I thought to myself “I wonder how many people would download and run a random executable” — implicitly trusting what it does. Of course I already knew the answer — I guess […]
The inner workings of a media creation tool
“Something went wrong”: An Autopilot + AAD + Intune reliability retrospective
I’m sure it would come as no surprise to anyone that the #1 troubleshooting step when you see an error message is to search for it via Google or whatever other search […]
Simplify the process of generating an AAD bulk enrollment provisioning package
The process is supposed to be fairly easy: Launch Windows Imaging and Configuration Designer (ICD), walk through the wizard, specify that you want to join Azure AD, type in your Azure AD […]
The mysterious case of the failed AD domain join
Sometimes I do some weird stuff, but this wasn’t one of those times. All I was trying to do was simple Configuration Manager task sequences to do bare metal deployment of Windows […]
MacOS Ventura: Where have I heard this before…
Apple released a new version of MacOS called Ventura (version 13), and it has generated some heated discussions around a topic that sounds very familiar: The replacement of the venerable System Preferences […]
Is 2023 the year for Windows 11?
I’ve stated in various forums that Windows 11 will be successful, whether you like it or not — eventually. That’s because the cost/benefit analysis shifts greatly as Windows 10 gets closer to […]
Want to see end of life dates for, well, anything?
The Windows 10 and Windows 11 release information pages are useful, and there’s also the Microsoft Lifecycle site (not quite as useful as you have to decipher it), but what if you […]
Prompt for time zone (and maybe other stuff) during Autopilot
In one of my sessions this week at the Workplace Ninja Summit, I included a video that showed how you could modify the OOBE flow to prompt for the time zone that […]
Send MDM commands without an MDM service using PowerShell
Sometimes you run into something completely by accident; other times, it’s more of a building process based on work that you’ve done in the past. In this case, it’s a combination of […]
How many ways are there to manage Autopilot devices and profiles?
Working on presentations frequently makes me revisit past stuff. And in this case, that “past stuff” predates my involvement with Windows Autopilot (I started working on it in 2018). Let’s go back […]
Fun with TPM firmware version numbers
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Autopilot log files, hardware hashes, and TPM-related “stuff.” And it’s always puzzled me why things have to be so difficult. In this case, it’s […]
Connect the dots: Create your own hashes
My previous post was to figure out the format of an Autopilot (OAv3) hash. But there’s more to that intellectual exercise than the exercise itself, because I wanted to be able to […]
Geeking out: Offline domain join
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 […]
Automatically join devices to Azure AD
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 
You must be logged in to post a comment.