My previous blog talked about how to create a Windows PE boot image. Next you need to know how to boot it. And there are plenty different ways to do that. These […]
Michael Niehaus
Build your own Windows PE image
Windows PE has been around for quite a while. (I’ll avoid getting into the history here, but I may revisit that with a future post.) But the instructions for creating a Windows […]
Product Review: Lenovo ThinkStation P620
I’ve done lots of posts, but never an actual product review. But enough people asked me about the workstation I am using to run virtual machines, so I thought it was a […]
Fun with VMware Fusion network adapters and Windows PE
I’ve been doing some Windows 10 deployments on Mac OS running VMware Fusion (version 11.5.7) and have been struggling with DRIVER_PNP_WATCHDOG blue screens booting Windows PE. After some investigation, I narrowed it […]
Export-WindowsDriver doesn’t work?
I needed a set of VMware drivers for Windows PE. The VMware documentation for doing that is rather ancient (and ineffective), so I went to plan B, extracting the drivers from a […]
Turn off the Azure AD “Stay signed in?” page
After years of clicking “yes” on the dialog: I finally decided it was time to turn it off. While it might be useful in web browsers, it’s generally not useful in the […]
Using PSExec with Windows Terminal
I’ve grown quite attached to using Windows Terminal to run PowerShell, cmd.exe, and various other command-line environments. As it implements a fairly standard console environment and can be customized, it’s pretty easy […]
Quick note: Windows 10 2004/20H2 and renamed Administrator accounts
This one popped up on Twitter today, although it’s been around for about a month: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4592802/error-when-accessing-the-sign-in-options-or-users-mmc-snap-in The quick summary from how I read this: If you’ve renamed the local Administrator or Guest […]
Windows PE startup, revisited
Way back when, I had to decipher the mechanism used in Windows PE to run stuff, i.e. to kick off the MDT/BDD processes. It’s been years since I looked at that, because […]
Geeking out with UEFI, again
Last year, I published a blog that got into a fair amount of depth on UEFI that was surprisingly popular, both at the time I posted it and again last month after […]
What’s in a (Windows computer) name?
The year was 1983. A new set of APIs called NetBIOS was introduced, used by the IBM PC Network LAN software. That API established a device naming convention that allowed for 15 […]
Setting up independent environments in Hyper-V
It seems like I’ve always got a few different environments running in Hyper-V, each with their own DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, etc. running in them. And in today’s cloud-connected world, they can’t […]
“Something went wrong” with OOBEAADV10
Maybe you’ve seen this error before: The explanation is somewhat simple, even if the cause might not be: It means that there was some sort of error while loading the Azure AD […]
Need for (disk) speed
The speed of computers has come a long way since I first started working with them. And while we can all appreciate that CPUs are orders of magnitude faster and that we […]
Network tracing during OOBE with Fiddler
Sometimes you need to see what’s going on as a device is joining Azure AD and enrolling in an MDM service. Since that process is typically done during OOBE, that means capturing […]
I’m not dead yet
I (somewhat) quoted Douglas Adams when I posted that I was leaving Microsoft after 16+ years. And after reading enough comments on that on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. that sounded more like eulogies, […]
Tech-related podcasts to follow
Initially, I started listening to podcasts for a way to relax during the daily commute. Then that daily commute disappeared (permanently for me, but I suspect many others will eventually return to […]
Windows 10 and a PC’s real-time clock
I’ve written enough about the challenges of Windows devices and the real-time clock that you’ve probably heard this one before: Windows stores the time in the real-time clock in the local time […]
So long, and thanks for the Coke Zero
It might be a corny take on the Douglas Adams book title and quote, but there is a point to it. Friday was my last day working for Microsoft. In these odd […]
30 years in the industry, many more to go…
It occurred to me over the summer that I missed a significant milestone: As of May 2020, I had been working in IT and technology for 30 years. That started with my […]
Out of Office Hours 
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