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 […]
What’s in a (Windows computer) name?
Michael Niehaus
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 […]
Persistently disabling Shift-F10 in OOBE
A couple of months ago I did a blog post that talked about how to disable Shift-F10 during OOBE by creating a DisableCmdRequest.tag file in the right location. I mentioned at the […]
Export all your hardware hashes from ConfigMgr
Quite some time ago, ConfigMgr added an inventory class that gathers the hardware hashes needed to register devices with Windows Autopilot from every Windows 10 device that it is managing. Those are […]
Coming soon: Improvements to app installation error handling in ESP
For those of you who have been deploying apps (of any type, Win32, LOB/MSI, UWP, etc.) during a Windows Autopilot provisioning process with ESP enabled, you may have noticed that an installation […]
Improving the ESP duration
I talked about the behavior of the Windows MDM stack in a blog post about a year ago. The quick recap: When a device first enrolls in Intune, it will initiate an […]
Speeding up Windows Autopilot for existing devices
2020-09-08 quick note: This blog post was resurrected from an original post on http://blogs.technet.microsoft.com (RIP) from October 25, 2018, posted here with minimal edits. At Ignite 2018, we announced Windows Autopilot for […]
Using Microsoft Graph from Python
I’ve spent a lot of time using the Microsoft Graph for interacting with Azure Active Directory, Intune, and Windows Autopilot. Most of this has been done using PowerShell (scripting) or C# (programming). […]
Command line apps from the store: How does that work?
I had talked about the Windows Package Manager, WINGET.EXE, in a previous blog, but one thing always made me wonder: How do those actually work? I mean certainly the app packages contain […]
Time, time, time (and location services)
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about time, time zones, with multiple blogs (part 1 and part 2) talking about available options. One of the options that I mentioned in the […]
Windows 10 2004 + every local experience pack = A planet-wide OS image
I talked about the improvements that Windows 10 version 2004 introduced with local experience packs in a previous blog. In the context of Windows Autopilot and OOBE, you can add one or […]
Changing the Hyper-V screen resolution during OOBE
2020-08-01 quick note: This blog post is resurrected from a December 2017 blog on the old blogs.technet.microsoft.com site (RIP), posted here with minimal edits. I’ve recorded a variety of videos (especially for […]
Out of Office Hours 
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