Out of Office Hours

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  • 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: What is available that you should ignore? The new Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024 release. Just stick with the normal annual releases, which are supported for…

  • 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…

  • Cumulative updates will be installed during OOBE, like it or not

    A while back, I noticed that updates were installing at the end of the Autopilot process, after device ESP had completed and before the user signed in. Per Microsoft’s post, this is now going to happen on all Windows 11 devices starting soon: The summary: At the moment, there are no controls available for this.…

  • Autopilot branding package updated for MDE

    Microsoft published KB5043950 which describes an issue where the Defender for Endpoint agent (Sense client) isn’t installed as expected on Windows 11 24H2. This can happen when a device is upgraded from Home to Pro: that feature now isn’t present in Home, and it doesn’t get added when the device is “transmogged” to Pro. As…

  • Windows Autopilot v2: Associating devices with a tenant

    While doing some Autopilot (v1) pre-provisioning work using the latest Windows 11 Insider Canary ring build (27695), I noticed a new item in the UI: If you try it out, you can see a rough version of this new Autopilot v2 (Autopilot device preparation) user experience, but it’s very clear that this functionality isn’t done…

  • Another Media Tool release, this one with USB support

    I always thought the process of creating Windows USB media was pretty simple: take a USB key, format it as FAT32, then XCOPY the contents of an ISO to that USB key. But there are some complications: So, I’ve updated the Media Tool again. As before, you can get the latest version from GitHub at…

  • Comparing directory contents without extra tools

    I had a need to compare two directories to see what differences existed between them. In the past, I had used utilities like WinDiff and WinMerge to do that, but I was hoping to do that more easily. A simple Bing search took me to a superuser.com post that had the simplest possible answer: Just…

  • “Windows RT in the Enterprise”

    Here’s a blast from the past: a document that I wrote many years ago about Windows RT in the Enterprise. We all remember how that went, right? This particular document version, which has highlights in it that weren’t in the original, came from someone (a customer who in the end didn’t buy any of the…

  • OneDrive in Windows media is not up to date

    That might seem like an obvious statement: the OneDrive client is updated frequently, so of course the version of OneDrive that is included in Windows 10 and 11 media is going to be out of date. But just how out of date? Let’s take a look. OneDrive is not installed in the images on Windows…

  • Updated Media Tool available

    Back in 2023, I posted a Media Tool app (which uses PowerShell behind the scenes) to download Windows 10 or 11 media, for both x64 and ARM64 architectures. I’ve now uploaded a new version of that with a few tweaks: You can get the latest version directly from GitHub at this link: OofhoursMediaTool.zip The new…

  • Windows device provisioning with Workspace ONE, part 4: Other provisioning scenarios

    Provisioning a new device can be done in ways other than with Windows Autopilot. Let’s look at some scenarios implemented in Workspace ONE that leverage technologies that have been around since before Windows Autopilot even existed. Provisioning packages When using provisioning packages (PPKG files), you create a single file (.ppkg) that contains settings that should…

  • Windows device provisioning with Workspace ONE, part 3: Windows Autopilot

    In the first part, I set up Workspace ONE and integrated it into my existing Entra ID (Azure AD) tenant. In part 2, I set up apps and policies that should be deployed to my devices. That prepares me for the next step, provisioning new devices with Windows Autopilot. Configuring ESP Deep in the Workspace…