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Michael Niehaus' technology ramblings

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023

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How big are the built-in Windows 11 apps?

By Michael Niehaus on April 21, 2022 • ( 2 Comments )

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

By Michael Niehaus on April 12, 2022 • ( 1 Comment )

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 […]

Geeking out: Offline domain join

By Michael Niehaus on March 15, 2022

Way back in 2009, with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, a new feature was added called “offline domain join” (ODJ for short). Initially, the feature wasn’t understood […]

Do you properly wipe your disks (maybe following US government standards)?

By Michael Niehaus on March 9, 2022 • ( 2 Comments )

This is one of those topics that I’ve been in the middle of for years. “Can you tell me how to properly wipe a disk before we dispose of or return this […]

Want to refresh a Windows 11 device? Don’t use USMT.

By Michael Niehaus on March 8, 2022 • ( 4 Comments )

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 […]

Bare metal provisioning: Boot options

By Michael Niehaus on March 5, 2022

When we were first looking at implementing bare metal provisioning as part of what became the Tanium Provision module, we were already into the Covid-19 pandemic work-from-home mindset. So, we expanded our […]

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 )

2022-08-17: Feel free to read through this post and then check out the new follow-up post that compares the latest versions of Parallels and VMware Fusion. Also see this post that clarifies […]

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 […]

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