The idea behind the UEFI Secure Boot feature is to ensure that the device will only be able to run trusted code, at least until an operating system is up and running […]
Booting your own Windows PE image
My previous blog talked about how to create a Windows PE boot image. Next you need to know how to boot it. And there are plenty different ways to do that. These […]
Build your own Windows PE image
Windows PE has been around for quite a while. (I’ll avoid getting into the history here, but I may revisit that with a future post.) But the instructions for creating a Windows […]
Product Review: Lenovo ThinkStation P620
I’ve done lots of posts, but never an actual product review. But enough people asked me about the workstation I am using to run virtual machines, so I thought it was a […]
Fun with VMware Fusion network adapters and Windows PE
I’ve been doing some Windows 10 deployments on Mac OS running VMware Fusion (version 11.5.7) and have been struggling with DRIVER_PNP_WATCHDOG blue screens booting Windows PE. After some investigation, I narrowed it […]
Export-WindowsDriver doesn’t work?
I needed a set of VMware drivers for Windows PE. The VMware documentation for doing that is rather ancient (and ineffective), so I went to plan B, extracting the drivers from a […]
Turn off the Azure AD “Stay signed in?” page
After years of clicking “yes” on the dialog: I finally decided it was time to turn it off. While it might be useful in web browsers, it’s generally not useful in the […]
Using PSExec with Windows Terminal
I’ve grown quite attached to using Windows Terminal to run PowerShell, cmd.exe, and various other command-line environments. As it implements a fairly standard console environment and can be customized, it’s pretty easy […]
Quick note: Windows 10 2004/20H2 and renamed Administrator accounts
This one popped up on Twitter today, although it’s been around for about a month: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4592802/error-when-accessing-the-sign-in-options-or-users-mmc-snap-in The quick summary from how I read this: If you’ve renamed the local Administrator or Guest […]
Windows PE startup, revisited
Way back when, I had to decipher the mechanism used in Windows PE to run stuff, i.e. to kick off the MDT/BDD processes. It’s been years since I looked at that, because […]
Geeking out with UEFI, again
Last year, I published a blog that got into a fair amount of depth on UEFI that was surprisingly popular, both at the time I posted it and again last month after […]
What’s in a (Windows computer) name?
The year was 1983. A new set of APIs called NetBIOS was introduced, used by the IBM PC Network LAN software. That API established a device naming convention that allowed for 15 […]
Setting up independent environments in Hyper-V
It seems like I’ve always got a few different environments running in Hyper-V, each with their own DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, etc. running in them. And in today’s cloud-connected world, they can’t […]
“Something went wrong” with OOBEAADV10
Maybe you’ve seen this error before: The explanation is somewhat simple, even if the cause might not be: It means that there was some sort of error while loading the Azure AD […]
Need for (disk) speed
The speed of computers has come a long way since I first started working with them. And while we can all appreciate that CPUs are orders of magnitude faster and that we […]
Network tracing during OOBE with Fiddler
Sometimes you need to see what’s going on as a device is joining Azure AD and enrolling in an MDM service. Since that process is typically done during OOBE, that means capturing […]
I’m not dead yet
I (somewhat) quoted Douglas Adams when I posted that I was leaving Microsoft after 16+ years. And after reading enough comments on that on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. that sounded more like eulogies, […]
Tech-related podcasts to follow
Initially, I started listening to podcasts for a way to relax during the daily commute. Then that daily commute disappeared (permanently for me, but I suspect many others will eventually return to […]
Windows 10 and a PC’s real-time clock
I’ve written enough about the challenges of Windows devices and the real-time clock that you’ve probably heard this one before: Windows stores the time in the real-time clock in the local time […]
So long, and thanks for the Coke Zero
It might be a corny take on the Douglas Adams book title and quote, but there is a point to it. Friday was my last day working for Microsoft. In these odd […]
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