Out of Office Hours

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  • Fun with TPM firmware version numbers

    I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Autopilot log files, hardware hashes, and TPM-related “stuff.” And it’s always puzzled me why things have to be so difficult. In this case, it’s about something really simple: The TPM firmware version of a particular TPM chip/device. If you look in the TPM MMC, you see a…

  • Connect the dots: Create your own hashes

    My previous post was to figure out the format of an Autopilot (OAv3) hash. But there’s more to that intellectual exercise than the exercise itself, because I wanted to be able to create a hash myself, from scratch. When you know the format, you can “invent” your own machine. For example: And then I should…

  • Connect the dots: Reverse-engineering an Autopilot hash

    I previously posted details on breaking down an Autopilot hash (really, an OAv3 hash as these aren’t Autopilot-specific), leveraging the OA3TOOL.EXE utility in the ADK to convert the hash into a printable XML format. But how do you go from that 4000-byte (exactly) string of letters to something intelligible? With a little bit of reverse…

  • Connect the dots: Remediating the Autopilot hardware hash

    It’s a common problem: You send a PC off for repair and it comes back with a different hardware component and is no longer recognized as an Autopilot-registered device. In an attempt to help with this, Microsoft mentioned during a recent AMA that a new feature was added to Autopilot to help automate the remediation…

  • Connect the dots: From hardware hash to Autopilot profile

    In my previous blog post about the hardware hash used with Windows Autopilot, as well as in the official documentation, it mentions that the exact algorithm for identifying a machine isn’t documented. But that doesn’t mean we can’t narrow it down. Going back even further in the blog archive, I posted about using Fiddler to…

  • Bypassing Windows 11 hardware requirements, revisited

    As I stated previously, bypassing the Windows 11 hardware requirements can be done, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And I stand by that. But based on a couple of Twitter threads, there’s some debate over the effectiveness of the LabConfig settings in bypassing those requirements. So, for clarity, let’s try them out…

  • Rufus isn’t magic: How it modifies Windows 11 media

    I keep seeing messages on social media about using Rufus to work around various things in the Windows 11 installation process that people don’t like. But no one ever actually explains what these are doing behind the scenes. Fortunately, since Rufus is open source, we can just look at the source code on GitHub to…

  • Geeking out with the UEFI boot manager

    It seems like every time I need to work with UEFI, it turns into a multi-day affair involving reading spec documents and source code examples. And this time is no exception. The task sounded simple enough: If you’ve got a UEFI-based machine that is currently running Windows, how can you force it to reboot into…

  • Breaking down the Windows Autopilot hardware hash

    Lots of you have gone through the effort of gathering the Windows Autopilot hardware hash from a computer (with around 17 million downloads of the Get-WindowsAutopilotInfo script on the PowerShell Gallery), with even more devices registered directly by OEMs and resellers when the device is purchased. But what exactly is a hardware hash? The documentation…

  • Requiring a network connection during OOBE

    When deploying an organization-owned device, you typically want to put “guard rails” in place to make sure the user goes down the right path. (Really, that’s what Windows Autopilot is all about, simplifying the OOBE experience by getting rid of all the complexity that Microsoft introduced into OOBE over the years.) One of those “guard…

  • Product Review: Apcsilmic DOT 1 Mini PC

    I’ll state this up front: I’m a fan of ARM64-based PCs. They may not always be the best choice for everyone, but there are always scenarios where they make sense (whether running Windows 11, some flavor of Linux, or even ChromeOS). So when the Apcsilmic DOT 1 Mini PC was announced, I had to get…

  • Language pack handling in Windows 11 continues to evolve

    The later Windows 10 releases were shifting to using Language Experience Packs (LXPs), which had a variety of limitations. So it wasn’t terribly surprising when Windows 11 shifted back to focusing on language pack CAB files (LP.CAB) for the 38 full languages that Windows 11 supports, along with five “special” language interface packs (LIPs) which…

  • Customizing the Windows 11 22H2 Start menu layout

    When Windows 11 shipped, the Start menu wasn’t particularly flexible. One of the biggest losses was the ability to group apps into folders. With the release of Windows 11 Insider build 22557, that capability is back. The mechanism might not be immediately obvious — I looked for a right-click menu to create a group, but…

  • Getting rid of Widgets in Windows 11

    It’s becoming a theme: things get added to Windows, IT pros want to know how to remove them. Maybe it would be better to not include them in the first place and provide a simple mechanism to add them, maybe a store or something like that? Since that doesn’t seem to be the pattern with…

  • Getting rid of Teams (consumer)

    I’ve seen all the grumbling about the consumer Teams app (the one with the white “T” icon) being a bit of a pain to remove, which I didn’t understand — it’s just another provisioned MSIX app, right? The real story is a bit more complicated. First, I confused myself while working on a previous blog…

  • How big are the built-in Windows 11 apps?

    It seems like a simple enough question. For all of the apps that are built into Windows 10 and Windows 11, just how much disk space are they taking up? That question takes a little bit of effort to answer. First, the built-in apps are provisioned into the OS, and we can get a list…

  • Microsoft will let you run Windows 11 on an M1 Mac, but they won’t support it

    In a previous blog post, I talked about two products that enabled running the ARM64 version of Windows 11 on M1-based Macs, Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. Both work reasonably well, but there was one challenge: At that point, Microsoft wouldn’t sell you a version of Windows 11 to run on it. There were two…

  • Geeking out: Offline domain join

    Way back in 2009, with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, a new feature was added called “offline domain join” (ODJ for short). Initially, the feature wasn’t understood very well (imagine that) and people expected it would perform magic, enabling you to easily join all of your devices into Active Directory…

  • Do you properly wipe your disks (maybe following US government standards)?

    This is one of those topics that I’ve been in the middle of for years. “Can you tell me how to properly wipe a disk before we dispose of or return this PC, following standard X?” where “X” can be one of a few different standards: US Department of Defense (DoD) directive 5220.22M NIST Special…

  • Want to refresh a Windows 11 device? Don’t use USMT.

    It’s a process I’ve done hundreds of times: wipe-and-load an existing device with a new Windows OS image, using USMT to capture documents and settings, migrating them forward to the new clean OS. It’s a process that’s worked well since the first time I tried it with Windows XP. So enter Windows 11 and the…