It seems like every time I need to work with UEFI, it turns into a multi-day affair involving reading spec documents and source code examples. And this time is no exception. The […]
Geeking out with the UEFI boot manager
Product Review: Apcsilmic DOT 1 Mini PC
I’ll state this up front: I’m a fan of ARM64-based PCs. They may not always be the best choice for everyone, but there are always scenarios where they make sense (whether running […]
Language pack handling in Windows 11 continues to evolve
The later Windows 10 releases were shifting to using Language Experience Packs (LXPs), which had a variety of limitations. So it wasn’t terribly surprising when Windows 11 shifted back to focusing on […]
Customizing the Windows 11 22H2 Start menu layout
When Windows 11 shipped, the Start menu wasn’t particularly flexible. One of the biggest losses was the ability to group apps into folders. With the release of Windows 11 Insider build 22557, […]
Getting rid of Widgets in Windows 11
It’s becoming a theme: things get added to Windows, IT pros want to know how to remove them. Maybe it would be better to not include them in the first place and […]
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 […]
Do you properly wipe your disks (maybe following US government standards)?
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 […]
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, […]
M1 Mac virtualization: Parallels Desktop vs. VMware Fusion
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 implemented some new hardware requirements for Windows 11, and […]
What’s new in Windows 11, part 2
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
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 […]
Out of Office Hours 
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