Most people remember that I left Microsoft and joined Tanium a while back. One of the things I’ve been working on at Tanium was publicly announced this week, with a Go-Tanium YouTube […]
Introducing Tanium Provision
Make Windows images smaller, easily
Back in March, I posted about the actual size of Windows 10 images over time, which resulted in the table below. Windows 10 release WIM size Windows 10 Enterprise 1511 3.75GB Windows […]
You too can build a Windows 7 image…
…but why would you want to? I needed to do some testing on Windows 7 and needed an image of it with PowerShell 5.1 included. (PowerShell 2.0 is pretty ancient and lacks […]
Windows 11: More new SKUs?
There are more rumors flying around about new Windows 11 SKUs (editions), including one called Windows 11 SE. But interestingly that wasn’t in the Windows 11 ISO that leaked. It just had […]
More on Windows 11 widgets
It seems like only it was only a short time ago when the News and Interests feature was delivered through a monthly quality update to all Windows 10 devices. If you didn’t […]
Windows 11 Start menu observations
I initially installed the leaked Windows 11 build to see the changes for myself, as I mentioned in my previous post. After the installation, those changes were fairly obvious: But if you […]
Digging into Windows 11
If you missed the flurry of articles posted today, there was a leak of an ISO containing a fairly recent build (from May 30th) of Windows 11, build 21996. It’s a production-signed […]
Will there be a Windows 11?
That’s been the rumor circulating for the past few weeks, and it’s looking like the Windows event on June 24th will answer all the questions. Since I left Microsoft before conversations about […]
Windows PE: Why so big? Make it smaller.
I was working on some Windows PE images the other day and noticed something odd: The size of those images really didn’t make sense. I started off with just a few simple […]
What are Windows 10 Virtual SKUs?
This should really be “SKUs, Glorious (Windows) SKUs, part 3” after the previous part 1 and part 2 posts, but for whatever reason multi-part posts don’t get as many views. The joys […]
SKUs, Glorious (Windows) SKUs: part 2
First things first: As expected, the SKU vs. Edition distinction that I called out in part 1 was somewhat contentious with some people. I used the terms somewhat interchangeably through the article. […]
SKUs, Glorious (Windows) SKUs: part 1
Those who have used Windows for many years have seen different editions, also known as SKUs (a carry-over from the days of physical packaged products where “stock keeping units” were IDs assigned […]
Turn off News & Interests page via policy
Back in February when I wrote my previous blog on this topic, you could turn off News & Interests via a per-user registry edit. At that point, it was just in an […]
Creating the smallest Windows 10 image
In my previous post, I talked about the size of Windows 10. (And yes, it’s slowly getting bigger.) But if you wanted to make a smaller image, how much smaller is even […]
Defender definition updates fail from Windows Update on Windows 10 20H2?
I have been building Windows 10 images based on the Windows 10 20H2 media and seeing repeated failures on the “Security Intelligence Update for Microsoft Defender Antivirus – KB2267602” installation. When doing […]
Automating Disk Cleanup on Windows 10
I’ve seen a variety of blogs over the years that talk about how to do this, but I never took the time to actually try it myself. No time like the present. […]
MDT image capture fails when there are pending file renames
A bug in MDT? Yes, and it looks like it’s been there for a while (going back to Windows 8 at least). Here’s the basic scenario: Use a standard client task sequence […]
Is Windows 10 “Taking longer than expected”?
It seems like I run into this screen way too often: While there can be a number of causes for this (in my case, it’s usually because there’s a script that popped […]
How big is Windows 10?
Over the years, there have been plenty of discussions about the size of Windows images. Over time, there were a variety of efforts to try to squeeze the OS so that it […]
Running x64 on Windows 10 ARM64: How the heck does that work?
My previous blog post raised more questions in my mind than it answered. While Microsoft talks about x64 support being added to Windows 10 Insider builds, it doesn’t say how. And the […]
Out of Office Hours 