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  • Reading the Windows Autopilot tea leaves

    If you missed it this past week, let me first point you to the source: Windows deployment with the next generation of Windows Autopilot So what did this blog tell you? Certainly that there are changes being made to Windows Autopilot, but what are those changes and when will they be available? Some of that…

  • New tweak added to Autopilot Branding

    It’s something that always annoyed me: Why does the Start menu pop up when you first log in to Windows, both on a new install and on an upgrade? It’s not really necessary and can get in the way if you’ve got any auto-launching apps; they end up behind the Start menu, so you have…

  • Sample app secret decoder ring

    I’ve published a bunch of sample Win32 apps for Intune and Autopilot, most of which are just PowerShell scripts bundled into an .intunewin file. For the first few, I posted the step-by-step instructions for setting up the app, but after doing a few of these that got tedious because they follow the same pattern. Rather…

  • Updating in-box apps with PowerShell

    It’s always the simple things that turn out to be more complicated than expected. I was deploying new machines with Windows 11 and needed to automate the process of adding PowerShell 7.4 and .NET 8 to them. That should be simple enough, I can just use Winget to install them. But there was one problem:…

  • Move to Windows 11 or write a big check

    There are lots of IT admins with lots of different reasons why they don’t like or don’t want to move to Windows 11. But we’re at the point where none of that matters anymore — you’re going to either need to write a big check, or you’re going to need to complete the task by…

  • We need entertainment during ESP…

    We’ve all sat and watched the Enrollment Status Page (ESP) during an Autopilot provisioning process — it’s pretty boring overall, showing information that isn’t really useful (e.g. what does “Preparing for mobile device management” really mean) or that doesn’t change very often (e.g. why does that one app take so long). Maybe at some point…

  • Prompt for information during Autopilot with an app

    Back in 2022, I did a post about using the MDM terms of use page (which is almost never actually used since Azure AD now has a better solution as part of conditional access) to prompt for information during the MDM enrollment process. It was a little messy in that you had to host a…

  • ESP + app failures: Did Microsoft fix something?

    I’ve been used to the routine: If an app fails to install during Autopilot with ESP monitoring the progress, you don’t find out about it right away. Instead, you would have to wait until the ESP time limit passed and then you’d get a timeout error. Not only was that more difficult to troubleshoot than…

  • Entertaining bug of the day: Autopilot + Task Sequence

    If you are doing user-driven Windows Autopilot provisioning in combination with a ConfigMgr task sequence initiated via “Co-management settings” in Intune, you know that the task sequence is tracked as an application during the device ESP phase. (Read up more on this scenario in my previous blog if you want to learn more about this.)…

  • When does a Windows client sync with Intune?

    It seems like a simple question, but a complete answer isn’t necessarily simple. We can start off with the documentation: OK, so about every 8 hours. But it’s different right after you enroll, with the theory being that it might take a little more activity to get the device set up initially. The docs describe…

  • Using a well-known Intune app ID for access to Graph? Not for much longer.

    I noticed a section on the Features in development page that talks about a change coming on April 1st, which is not very far away (and an interesting place to put “we’re going to break things” notices): If you’re using the Intune PowerShell application ID (d1ddf0e4-d672-4dae-b554-9d5bdfd93547), you’ll need to update your scripts with a Microsoft…

  • Autopilot topics of the week

    It’s been a week of randomness, but at least some of that randomness is interesting. Let’s look at a few goings-on in the world of Windows Autopilot. Yes, you can generate hashes in Windows PE, but… A blog post by Johannes Bedrech described a process that could be used to generate hardware hashes in Windows…

  • What’s actually in a WIM or ESD file?

    It seemed like a simple question: Can you figure out what’s in an ESD file without download the whole file? I’ve been manipulating data like this quite a bit over the past couple of days, so I’d like to think I’m getting pretty good at it — so I had to take that as a…

  • Convert Windows 11 Home to Education for Autopilot

    It’s a question that’s come up a number of times: How can I take a device running Windows 11 Home, upgrade it to Windows 11 Education, and provision it via Windows Autopilot? I suppose we should start off with a more basic question: Why? For devices that ship with Windows 11 Pro, they are all…

  • WindowsApps folder getting out of hand?

    The whole Windows app (UWP) model is weird: apps are installed per user, but the files for those apps are shared between users. That leads to situations where there are several different versions of an app on the system, each of which with its files in C:\Program Files\WindowsApps (a tightly-secured folder that you’re not supposed to…

  • New enhancements to Get-AutopilotDiagnosticsCommunity

    It started off as a simple change: I was annoyed that the “Observed Timeline” in the output from the Get-AutopilotDiagnosticsCommunity (and the older Get-AutopilotDiagnostics script too) had events in the wrong order. For example, it would show that app #2 had started downloading before app #1 had finished, but that’s not what Intune Management Extension ever does. The…

  • Autopilot branding app improvements

    Since I had been testing out the UpdateOS script to see how it performed based on the number of CPU cores, I figured I should try the same thing with the Autopilot Branding package as I had noticed that it too was fairly slow, taking close to 10 minutes to complete in a VM. The first…

  • Autopilot randomly not working? Perhaps KB5033055 is to blame.

    I was doing some testing with Windows Autopilot on Windows 11 23H2 and couldn’t figure out why properly-registered machines with profiles assigned would “sometimes” behave like they weren’t registered with Autopilot. Instead of going to the Azure AD / work or school sign in page, it would display the OOBE license terms page: Sure, you could…

  • Installing updates during Autopilot: Windows 11 edition, revisited again

    This seems to be a frequent blog topic, with posts going back to 2019: So why bring this up yet again? I blame Gary Block, whose comment on Twitter said that he sees this taking about 10 minutes in his testing with a similar script: OK, so if it takes 10 minutes for a similar process,…

  • Looking back on 2023: Site statistics

    History has proven that posting top 10 lists detailing the most popular articles for the year on https://oofhours.com doesn’t draw many views. But I don’t care, I’m going to do it anyway. (Seriously, I don’t typically post anything for the views, it’s usually just something that interested me at the time, or something that I wanted to…