Got a question on Twitter yesterday on how to send a computer name to the MDT Monitoring Service really early in the OSD process. In fact even before the TS Environment is initialized and any ConfigMgr variables are being read. The scenario was basically that they wanted to see the real computer name in the […]

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While I highly recommend using the Modern Driver Management community solution for your driver management, here is a list of vendor driver catalogs you can download to look up model and driver details: HP Client Driver Pack Cataloghttps://ftp.hp.com/pub/caps-softpaq/cmit/HPClientDriverPackCatalog.cab HP Client Catalog for ConfigMgrhttps://hpia.hpcloud.hp.com/downloads/sccmcatalog/HpCatalogForSms.latest.cab Dell product cabinet filehttps://downloads.dell.com/catalog/DriverPackCatalog.cab Lenovo XML cataloghttps://download.lenovo.com/cdrt/td/catalogv2.xml Microsoft Models (via Maurice Daly)https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maurice-daly/DriverAutomationTool/master/Data/MSProducts.xml […]

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With the release of ConfigMgr Technical Preview 2101, Microsoft added in support for task sequences to use the smaller ESD packages that is part of the Windows 10 Servicing feature in ConfigMgr. Obviously I was interested in seeing what the real download amount would be when using these types of packages vs. standard WIM packages […]

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To make a long story short: When configuring user rights policies in Intune with a device configuration (custom profile), you'll find that the sample provided in the docs won't fully work. It does the correct configuration on the clients, but it will show you a remediation error in the Intune portal, which is not very […]

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So…. Is it good? No. Is it dynamic? No. Does it support settings? No. Does it support applications? No. Does it have any error handling? Also, no. Does it support drivers? Barely. But it is fast… 🙂 Before Altiris, BDD, MDT, SMS, PowerShell, and ConfigMgr and other deployment solutions there were batch files…. And many […]

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For anyone working with OSD for more than about 4 minutes, you know that its in the WinPE phase most of the magic happens. For testing and troubleshooting purposes its quite helpful to add some tools to your boot image, so you always have them available without having to download from a web server or […]

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If you ever tried to use the DaRT integration in MDT Lite Touch with Windows ADK 2004, you probably noticed that you will not see the command prompt in the remote viewer when pressing F8. This is due to a code change in Windows ADK 2004. Here is a quick fix for that. Note: This […]

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Once upon a time, in a ConfigMgr environment far, far away. There was a variable named SMSDP… 🙂 There are times when its useful to figure out what DP you are currently using, and back in ConfigMgr 2007, when integrated with MDT, there was a variable for that: The SMSDP variable . Here is a […]

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In Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager you can create an Edge Application using a Wizard that will download the latest (or a specific) version. Here there is also an option to select that once the browser is installed that it will auto update itself. However once this package is created it will always install the version […]

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I'm very exited to announce that our free eBook, A Geeks Guide to Windows 10 Deployment, has been updated to Windows 10 2004 and ConfigMgr 2002. To get your free copy, simply sign up for our newsletter here on the blog, and if you downloaded a previous version, simply go to the same link, and […]

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In Cloud OS Deployment, Part 1, you learned how to run MDT task sequences via Microsoft Intune for Computer Refresh and Inplace Upgrade / Windows 10 Servicing scenarios. And in Cloud OS Deployment, Part 2, you learned how to do bare metal deployments from the cloud via MDT, with or without any local infrastructure. In this […]

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Due to code changes in Windows ADK 10 v2004 the MDT utility (Microsoft.BDD.Utility.dll) that detects BIOS or UEFI firmware types no longer works correctly, and detects BIOS-based machines as UEFI-based machines. Update June 3, 2020: Microsoft released a hotfix for this issue. Basically a new version of Microsoft.BDD.Utility.dll: With this hotfix you don't need the […]

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In Cloud OS Deployment, Part 1, you learned how to run MDT task sequences via Microsoft Intune for Computer Refresh and Inplace Upgrade / Windows 10 Servicing scenarios. In this part you learn how to do bare metal deployments over Internet (http/https), with, or without any other corporate infrastructure. TL;DR By setting up a VM […]

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A few days ago I asked my fellow tweeps for some real-world numbers of the cost of using the pretty amazing CMG feature for ConfigMgr. The CMG Platform as a Service (PaaS) is using a A2 V2 instance which will determine the minimum cost, but, obviously, the price will vary depending on usage, downloads, and […]

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Here is a work in progress sample for a better installer script for Microsoft Edge. I'm still trying to figure out why the master_preferences file I create seem to be ignored, and I wanted to add in the update channel info that ConfigMgr automatically adds to its Edge installer script , but I haven't done […]

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With Windows 7 out of support, protecting your WAN links, and reducing the network impact Windows 10 will have on your environment has never been more important. In this post I wanted to compare Peer Cache and BranchCache in ConfigMgr for a specific scenario to see how they compared to each other. The scenario: I […]

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An organization contacted me last week regarding a few failing Windows 10 upgrades, it was a few Windows 7 to Windows 10 v1909 upgrades failing with the following error: The normal Windows 10 Inplace upgrade logs won't help you much troubleshooting an error like this, but what you can do is mimic what the setup […]

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Starting in ConfigMgr 1806, only machines that are online will be returned as a Peer Cache Source. During the process of finding the content for a peer asking for it, ConfigMgr runs the MP_GetSuperPeerContentLocations stored procedure to find the content. However, that stored procedure is a bit complicated to run just for figuring out where […]

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In a recent project / study, I had the need to measure the individual, as well as combined, outbound network traffic from a fixed set of of servers. In this example, a domain controller (DC01), a ConfigMgr Management Point (CM01), and a ConfigMgr Distribution Point (DP01). What can I say, PowerShell to the rescue. The […]

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Lately I have been doing a lot of performance testing for ConfigMgr OSD. Basically I've deploying separate batches of machines, and I needed a quick way monitor certain milestones of their deployment, and filter out everything else. The various task sequence reports and monitors I found out there gave me a bit to much info, […]

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