Out of Office Hours

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  • Prompt for time zone (and maybe other stuff) during Autopilot

    In one of my sessions this week at the Workplace Ninja Summit, I included a video that showed how you could modify the OOBE flow to prompt for the time zone that should be used in the device, and (very quickly) showed how it worked, promising to post more information. This is that information. First,…

  • Want your own Windows 11 21H2 ARM64 ISOs?

    I was trying out Parallels Desktop 18’s new feature that allows it to automatically download Windows 11 for ARM64 to install a new VM, and wondered how exactly that worked. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much effort to figure that out (with Fiddler to help). The basic flow is like this: Download the file https://download.microsoft.com/download/1/b/4/1b4e06e2-767a-4c9a-9899-230fe94ba530/products_Win11_20211115.cab and…

  • Getting rid of Teams (consumer), revisited

    My previous post on removing the consumer version of Teams from Windows 11 (to avoid confusion when you’re going to install the business version of Teams) had some holes. Rather than edit that post, I figured it’s best to just start from scratch. First, let’s review. Why are there two versions of Teams? That’s a…

  • Send MDM commands without an MDM service using PowerShell

    Sometimes you run into something completely by accident; other times, it’s more of a building process based on work that you’ve done in the past. In this case, it’s a combination of the two. While researching some MDM-related “stuff,” I came across a DLL named “mdmlocalmanagement.dll” and the file name got my interest, so I…

  • How many ways are there to manage Autopilot devices and profiles?

    Working on presentations frequently makes me revisit past stuff. And in this case, that “past stuff” predates my involvement with Windows Autopilot (I started working on it in 2018). Let’s go back to 2017, when Windows Autopilot was first being built (technically, it was probably 2016 since it released in 2017). There wasn’t yet any…

  • M1 Mac virtualization revisited: Parallels Desktop 18 vs. VMware Fusion 22H2 Preview

    I probably own more ARM64-based machines than then typical person, and I used those somewhat regularly for testing OS deployment scenarios. Virtual machines are usually more productive for those types of activities, hence my desire to run virtual machines on my M1 Mac Mini. My blog from February compared the options available at the time.…

  • 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…