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Michael Niehaus' technology ramblings

Friday, August 12th, 2022

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Automatically join devices to Azure AD

By Michael Niehaus on March 4, 2022

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, […]

M1 Mac virtualization: Parallels Desktop vs. VMware Fusion

By Michael Niehaus on February 26, 2022 • ( 3 Comments )

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

By Michael Niehaus on February 15, 2022

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

By Michael Niehaus on February 7, 2022

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)

By Michael Niehaus on January 31, 2022 • ( 3 Comments )

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

By Michael Niehaus on January 30, 2022 • ( 5 Comments )

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

By Michael Niehaus on January 26, 2022

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

By Michael Niehaus on January 25, 2022

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

By Michael Niehaus on January 24, 2022

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

By Michael Niehaus on January 22, 2022

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

By Michael Niehaus on January 22, 2022 • ( 4 Comments )

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

By Michael Niehaus on December 29, 2021

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

By Michael Niehaus on December 29, 2021

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?

By Michael Niehaus on December 25, 2021 • ( 1 Comment )

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

By Michael Niehaus on December 25, 2021

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

By Michael Niehaus on December 8, 2021

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

By Michael Niehaus on November 16, 2021 • ( 2 Comments )

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.

By Michael Niehaus on November 4, 2021

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

By Michael Niehaus on October 27, 2021 • ( 1 Comment )

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?

By Michael Niehaus on October 25, 2021 • ( 2 Comments )

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 […]

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