It started off as a simple task: Create a provisioning package that can be used to join a device to Azure AD. But when it comes to using the Windows Configuration Designer, […]
Automatically join devices to Azure AD
M1 Mac virtualization: Parallels Desktop vs. VMware Fusion
I have a Mac Mini with the original ARM-based M1 chip. Not surprisingly, the first thing I wanted to do on it was to run virtual machines. (You might think the first […]
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 […]
Geeking Out: Network booting
When we started working on Tanium Provision, one of the things we needed to build was a mechanism to do network booting. It’s fine to boot from a USB key (and necessary […]
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 […]
Upgrading to Windows 11 with Tanium
I’ve always known that Tanium supported doing in-place upgrades to later versions of Windows, but since I had been focused primarily on Tanium provision for bare metal imaging, I had never actually […]
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 […]
How does UEFI boot from a CD?
In a past post about UEFI, I talked about the boot process: The UEFI firmware looks for a FAT32 disk volume that contains a specific file, e.g. EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi, and it loads 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 […]
Trying out Proxmox VE, an open-source virtualization platform
I had a specific need (more on that later) that could be satisfied with solutions such as QEMU (an open-source machine emulator that can do all sorts of interesting things) and KVM […]
Changes to Windows 10 as a service
With today’s release of Windows 10 21H2 (a fairly boring release overall as there aren’t really any significant new features — thankfully it can easily be deployed to Windows 10 2004 and […]
Need to manage a diverse set of platforms? Try Tanium.
I spent a good portion of my career focused on managing and deploying Windows devices. Since most organizations have a lot of these, it made sense for most orgs to have teams […]
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 […]
How many types of Windows updates are there?
One of the biggest changes in Windows 10 was the move to cumulative updates. With this change, a lot of the nightmares that IT pros had with Windows XP disappeared. But even […]
Out of Office Hours 
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