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 […]
