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 […]
Getting rid of Widgets in Windows 11
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Windows 11 includes new BCD PowerShell cmdlets
When configuring the Windows boot configuration database (BCD), we’ve always had BCDEDIT.EXE, which is a reasonable tool to use but not a lot of fun to automate, e.g. finding and removing a […]
Fixing PowerShell on Windows PE for ARM64
In past blog posts, I noted that the ADK for Windows 10 started adding ARM64 builds of Windows PE, but they were missing some key things: no HTA support, and busted .NET […]
The overhead of Edge on Windows 11 (and 10)
I noticed while looking at the WebView2 processes on Windows 11 that there was also a set of Edge processes running from the moment I logged in: I understand why that happens […]
The overhead of Widgets and Teams in Windows 11
When you sign into an unmodified Windows 11 installation, you may notice the side-by-side icons for the Chat app (basically an entry point for the consumer version of Teams — the one […]
Windows 11: When 4GB is not 4GB
Funny story: I was trying to test out some Windows 11 upgrade scenarios and had configured a VM with 4GB of RAM since that’s the minimum required to support Windows 11. With […]
Introducing Tanium Provision
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 […]
You can bypass the Windows 11 hardware requirement check, but it’s not a good idea
2022-07-25: See https://oofhours.com/2022/07/25/bypassing-windows-11-hardware-requirements-revisited/ for more up to date information. 2021-01-25: Edited to reflect that settings that worked on Insider Preview builds no longer work with the released Windows 11 RTM builds. Microsoft […]
What’s new in Windows 11, part 2
Part 1 was rather lengthy, covering the UI changes in Windows 11. We’ll start off part 2 by looking at the changes to the Windows apps. Yes, these are also UI changes. […]
What’s new in Windows 11, part 1
I did a presentation at a couple of events in October and November that went through a fairly lengthy list of new features in Windows 11. This builds on the information that […]
Yes, Windows as a Subscription
I’m sure all of you remember when Windows as a Service was introduced with Windows 10. Most people thought this was really “Windows as a Subscription” and that Microsoft was somehow going […]
Customize the Windows 11 Start menu
In the original Windows 11 preview builds, the documentation published at the time only covered the OEM process for customizing the Start menu. The type of customization OEMs can do is fairly […]
Add a TPM to a VMware Fusion VM
As I noted in a previous blog post, Windows will now enforce the TPM 2.0 requirement for virtual machines with the latest Insider builds. Fortunately, VMware has documented how to do this […]
Windows 11: Some answers, some questions
Windows 11 is now officially available, as expected. (While it’s not yet October 5th in all of the world, it was made available when it became the 5th somewhere in the world.) […]
Windows 11 hardware requirements change again
I walked through all of the Windows 11 hardware requirements in my previous post, and I thought that was the last we’d have to look at that for a while. But I […]
Windows 11 new hardware requirements: Justified or not?
With the announcements of Windows 11, Microsoft disclosed new hardware requirements for Windows 11, which has easily become the most controversial and confusing part of the announcement. Even with subsequent clarifications, the […]
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