It’s something that always annoyed me: Why does the Start menu pop up when you first log in to Windows, both on a new install and on an upgrade? It’s not really […]
Sample app secret decoder ring
I’ve published a bunch of sample Win32 apps for Intune and Autopilot, most of which are just PowerShell scripts bundled into an .intunewin file. For the first few, I posted the step-by-step […]
Updating in-box apps with PowerShell
It’s always the simple things that turn out to be more complicated than expected. I was deploying new machines with Windows 11 and needed to automate the process of adding PowerShell 7.4 […]
We need entertainment during ESP…
We’ve all sat and watched the Enrollment Status Page (ESP) during an Autopilot provisioning process — it’s pretty boring overall, showing information that isn’t really useful (e.g. what does “Preparing for mobile […]
Prompt for information during Autopilot with an app
Back in 2022, I did a post about using the MDM terms of use page (which is almost never actually used since Azure AD now has a better solution as part of […]
ESP + app failures: Did Microsoft fix something?
I’ve been used to the routine: If an app fails to install during Autopilot with ESP monitoring the progress, you don’t find out about it right away. Instead, you would have to […]
Entertaining bug of the day: Autopilot + Task Sequence
If you are doing user-driven Windows Autopilot provisioning in combination with a ConfigMgr task sequence initiated via “Co-management settings” in Intune, you know that the task sequence is tracked as an application […]
When does a Windows client sync with Intune?
It seems like a simple question, but a complete answer isn’t necessarily simple. We can start off with the documentation: OK, so about every 8 hours. But it’s different right after you […]
Autopilot topics of the week
It’s been a week of randomness, but at least some of that randomness is interesting. Let’s look at a few goings-on in the world of Windows Autopilot. Yes, you can generate hashes […]
Convert Windows 11 Home to Education for Autopilot
It’s a question that’s come up a number of times: How can I take a device running Windows 11 Home, upgrade it to Windows 11 Education, and provision it via Windows Autopilot? […]
New enhancements to Get-AutopilotDiagnosticsCommunity
It started off as a simple change: I was annoyed that the “Observed Timeline” in the output from the Get-AutopilotDiagnosticsCommunity (and the older Get-AutopilotDiagnostics script too) had events in the wrong order. For example, […]
Autopilot branding app improvements
Since I had been testing out the UpdateOS script to see how it performed based on the number of CPU cores, I figured I should try the same thing with the Autopilot […]
Autopilot randomly not working? Perhaps KB5033055 is to blame.
I was doing some testing with Windows Autopilot on Windows 11 23H2 and couldn’t figure out why properly-registered machines with profiles assigned would “sometimes” behave like they weren’t registered with Autopilot. Instead of […]
Installing updates during Autopilot: Windows 11 edition, revisited again
This seems to be a frequent blog topic, with posts going back to 2019: So why bring this up yet again? I blame Gary Block, whose comment on Twitter said that he sees […]
Use the new community modules for Autopilot
As I mentioned in my previous post, there is a new community version of the WindowsAutopilotIntune PowerShell module that I created a few years ago (needed because the “official” Intune modules don’t […]
Get Autopilot for Existing Devices to skip the region page
In an Autopilot user-driven AAD join deployment profile, you can configure it to specify the “Language (Region)” and as long as there is network connectivity (e.g. a wired device), that will work […]
Renaming Autopilot-deployed devices
Over three years ago (yikes), I did a blog post that talked about renaming Hybrid AADJ devices after they have been deployed via Windows Autopilot. As I was revisiting that for an […]
Installing updates during Autopilot: Windows 11 edition, revisited
In my previous post about this, I was baffled by the issue I ran into: a reboot during the Autopilot process, needed after updates were installed, effectively bricked the device. But with […]
Run an MDT task sequence during Autopilot, revisited
In my previous post on the subject, everything worked well: I could take an MDT task sequence, package it up as an Intune Win32 app, and deploy it during an Autopilot provisioning […]
Installing updates during Autopilot: Windows 11 edition
Updated 2023-10-23: This post has effectively been superseded by this new post. The issues described below are actually not caused by the Windows update process; more details on that here. Back in […]