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  • Next-generation Autopilot Troubleshooting

    I’ve done a few troubleshooting blog posts over the years, and they are easily the most popular on my site. This one in particular is still going strong (#1 post of all time), almost five years later: Windows Autopilot diagnostics: Digging deeper That post introduced a script called Get-AutopilotDiagnostics.ps1, which is still available on the…

  • Automatically registering Autopilot devices with Intune

    I’ve seen a lot of blog posts about registering devices with Windows Autopilot, either at a command prompt in OOBE (Shift-F10, run PowerShell) or as part of some other automation. Now with Autopilot v2, there are actually two diferent types of registrations to be concerned with too: Autopilot device registration for APv1, using a hardware…

  • Windows Autopilot v2: Is it faster? It depends…

    Back when Autopilot v2 was announced, and carried over into the documentation, is a claim: [Windows Autopilot device preparation, a.k.a. Autopilot v2] reduces the time IT spends on deploying devices. OK, but what exactly does that mean? How does it reduce the time? I will assume that’s talking about the time per device (since one-time…

  • Upgrading Hyper-V to Windows Server 2025

    I have one big Hyper-V server, currenting running Windows Server 2022 Datacenter, that I use for lots of things (with 12 cores, 272GB RAM, 8TB of disk space). Upgrading it to Windows Server 2025 should be a straight-forward process, right? Insert the media (mounted, downloaded ISO), run SETUP.EXE, do the upgrade. But it took a…

  • Is SCCM failing to create WSUS indexes on your site server?

    TL;DR: SCCM maintenance tasks for WSUS no longer work if you are using WSUS with the Windows Internal Database (WID). When looking at the SCCM wsyncmgr.log, I noticed some SQL exceptions that occurred with each synchronization: It’s easy to see what it’s trying to do: it’s trying to create some indexes to improve the performance…

  • Automatically update PowerShell 7.4 with WSUS or SCCM

    Microsoft enabled automatic updates for PowerShell with the release of PowerShell 7.2; that continues now with PowerShell 7.4. If you’re devices are updated from Windows Update directly and you’ve enabled updates when you installed PowerShell 7, you’re all set. But if you are using WSUS or SCCM, there’s another step that is necessary: you have…

  • Love/hate: Windows imaging and licensing

    I spent a lot of time in the weeds around Windows licensing, but I’d prefer to forget it all. Sadly, that’s usually not an option, especially as I work on Windows imaging technologies. Since it’s been a while since I looked at that stuff, I figured I would start from the beginning to see if…

  • New release of Autopilot Branding available

    I have merged in changes from the community to create a new release on GitHub, which you can find here: https://github.com/mtniehaus/AutopilotBranding/releases/tag/2024-12-27 You can find the release notes on the release itself: Follow the links to the pull requests (#11, #14) for full details. (It’s worth noting that the “remove the Windows Store” item above refers…

  • If your reseller tells you to buy PCs with Windows 11 Enterprise preinstalled, it’s time to find a new reseller

    I could stop there, but I won’t. In any case, let’s review the Windows Enterprise SKU licensing model, straight from the source: Windows 11 Enterprise is licensed as an upgrade license to Windows Pro. But doesn’t that mean you’re paying for Windows 11 twice? Yes. Is there any way to avoid that? Well, you can…

  • Developing on Windows 11 ARM64, one year in

    After a long time working exclusively on Windows devices, I had switched to MacOS on a MacBook Pro a few years ago because that was the practical thing to do while working on cross-platform development based around open-source technologies. The biggest downside: it was an Intel-based Mac, and the battery life when running Edge (for…

  • MDT has an end date

    After years of neglect, no one was terribly surprised when Microsoft said that MDT would not support Windows 11. Even prior to that, it was often up to the community to keep things working as new Windows and ADK releases came out. So it was also not surprising that the community also kept using MDT…

  • Capturing a Windows 11 image with MDT

    It’s something that I hadn’t tried in a while: Capturing a custom Windows 11 image using MDT. But there were a few posts on Reddit commenting about challenges doing so, so I thought I’d try it. First off, you should make sure that you have MDT fully updated; Johan’s guide is a good start: The…

  • CMPivot crashing on startup? Maybe it’s config file is messed up.

    Sometimes I would like to try something and have it “just work.” Today was not one of those times. The task was simple: I want to try to use CMPivot to query information from my VMs. Step #1: Launch CMPivot from the ConfigMgr admin console. Nothing happens. Checking the event log on the computer, I…

  • All done at Live 360! Tech Con

    Six conferences in one week, and boy am I tired. Well, really it was six events in one, all in the same place (Orlando) at the same time. But it was still tiring — 12+ hours of sleep later and I’m now functional again. This was the second year in a row that I presented…

  • Finally, a standalone version of Connected Cache for Delivery Optimization

    If you are using Windows 10 or 11 (i.e. everyone), you are using Delivery Optimization (DO) to download all sorts of things — see Phil Wilcock’s post for a good overview of where DO is used. In an ideal world, everything would be downloaded once from the internet and then pulled from peers in the…

  • Windows 11 24H2 is available, but…

    Yes, Windows 11 24H2 is available to everyone (after being ARM64-only for a few months). As usual, there are a number of related items updated at the same time: A new ADK version. Technically this was released back in May with the release of the Snapdragon X Elite-based machines and the Windows 11 24H2 ARM64…

  • Another toy: the Snapdragon Dev Kit

    The Snapdragon Dev Kit, an ARM64 desktop PC running the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite CPU, was announced at Build 2024 back in May 2024, and was supposed to ship in June. I ordered one in July and saw the ship date change a number of times, most recently to January 2025. But shortly after…

  • Microsoft deprecated WSUS — should you care?

    Triggered by the publishing of documentation for Windows Server 2025 about features removed or no longer being developed, Microsoft published a separate post explicitly calling out one of those items: WSUS. While the Server post described it as “no longer being developed,” the separate post called that “deprecated.” But what exactly does that mean? If…

  • How complicated is OOBE?

    A long time ago, the original marketing materials for Windows Autopilot (before it had a name) were created by the engineers working on the product. It pitched Autopilot as a way to simplifying the out-of-box experience (OOBE) for Windows, even though it was Microsoft that made OOBE so complicated in the first place. Obviously that…

  • Cumulative updates during OOBE: Never mind…

    Remember the change planned for October to start installing updates during OOBE?  The one that didn’t have any controls?  The one that interrupts the Autopilot user-driven flow by rebooting the computer in the middle of the process? Well, the Microsoft post announcing this has been updated to say that it has been postponed until they…