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Johan Arwidmark

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Remote Desktop Session Keeps Disconnecting – The Solution

By Johan Arwidmark / March 19, 2023

In my lab I have quite a few machines I remote into on a daily basis, but one of them, connected to the same network switch, would at times disconnect me several times per hour. Sometimes the session reconnected itself, sometimes I had to close the initial connection, and connect again. Researching the problem After […]

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Creating Pre-Caching Task Sequences using PowerShell

By Johan Arwidmark / March 17, 2023

Here is a PowerShell script that will create a pre-caching task sequence for ConfigMgr. In this example I'm enumerating all driver packages, and creating a pre-caching task sequence with those packages. If you want to learn more about the core concept of pre-caching for P2P in ConfigMgr, check this post: Pre-Caching Content for P2P in […]

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Optimizing VHDX Files in a Hyper-V Lab

By Johan Arwidmark / February 27, 2023

In my Lab(s), I have hundreds of VMs spread across multiple Hyper-V hosts (and a few VMware hosts too, but that's out of scope for this post). The operating systems used for my Hyper-V hosts are a mix of Windows Server 2016, 2019, and 2022. Also, I have Data DeDuplication enabled on all volumes used […]

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Understanding the MDT Lite Touch Driver Repository

By Johan Arwidmark / February 26, 2023

Earlier this week I was asked to help out with an MDT Lite Touch Driver Repository that was missing most of its drivers. After some research it turned out that the drivers.xml had been truncated, something that can happen if multiple admin are working with drivers at the same time (MDT uses a last-writer-wins approach). […]

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Total Control for Drivers and Firmware – Cloud Edition

By Johan Arwidmark / February 26, 2023

Having total control for drivers and firmware, mean that you are following a per model method when deploying or updating drivers. The total control method has been proven rock-solid for on-premises deployment solutions, and with the newly released commercial controls for driver and firmware updates in the WUfB deployment service it is time to take […]

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Use a Win32 app to Copy Files and Folders

By Johan Arwidmark / December 2, 2022

Here is a quick guide to create a Win32 app in Intune to copy som files and folders to your clients. In the example I had some tools I wanted to copy to all my lab machines and use Microsoft Intune to do so. Source Folder In this example I copied my files and folders […]

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Exploring Firmware Assessments in Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management

By Johan Arwidmark / November 30, 2022

On November 28 (yesterday), the new Firmware Assessments feature in Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management was announced as being available in Public Preview. Read more about the announcement here: Firmware assessments in Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management Licensing The license requirements are too often clear as mud, but it seems to work just fine with a regular […]

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Trigger Full WSUS Metadata Synchronization in ConfigMgr

By Johan Arwidmark / November 22, 2022

If you ever have the need to force/trigger a full sync of the WSUS Metadata in ConfigMgr, for example for troubleshooting, or simple demo purposes. This is how. Forcing WSUS Metadata sync PowerShell to the rescue 🙂 Simply run this command after importing the Configuration Manager PowerShell module: The above command really just creates an […]

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Deploying Windows 11 on Arm Devices – Jurassic Deployment Style

By Johan Arwidmark / November 4, 2022

I recently bought a machine capable of running Windows 11 on Arm, The Windows Dev Kit 2023 aka Project Volterra. Now, since neither MDT nor ConfigMgr support Windows deployment on Arm devices, in this post you find a quick and dirty solution that takes us back to the Jurassic era, before OSD was cool 🙂 To […]

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Back to Basics – Implementing an Image Factory

By Johan Arwidmark / November 1, 2022

Last week I was participating in a thread on Twitter regarding a request for Microsoft to generate monthly updated media (ISO files) for all supported Windows versions. Something that Microsoft certainly can do, and probably do internally, but for whatever reason have decided to only publish for the very latest versions of Windows. Because of […]

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MDT Lite Touch Warning – Unable to create WebService class

By Johan Arwidmark / October 31, 2022

Every now and then when using MDT Lite Touch to deploy Windows you may run into a yellow summary screen (warning screen) with the following warning message: Unable to create WebService class Background In the preceding example there were some other warnings as well, but you often find the Unable to create WebService class message […]

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Highlights from Microsoft Technical Takeoff, October 24-27, 2022

By Johan Arwidmark / October 28, 2022

Unless you have been totally off grid the last few days you probably noticed a ton of new information on Endpoint Management from Microsoft, more specifically from the Microsoft Technical Takeoff event that has been running this week. The Microsoft Technical Takeoff event was combination of about live AMA (Ask Microsoft Anything) sessions and pre-recorded […]

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Speeding up Win32 apps upload via PowerShell

By Johan Arwidmark / September 8, 2022

For those of you following me on social media, you know that I for the past two months or so have been researching how Intune could be used to deploy large applications. While this post covers how to decrease the time it takes to upload the applications, you can read the initial post below: Deploying […]

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Deploying Large Applications using Microsoft Intune

By Johan Arwidmark / August 26, 2022

In late July, I was asked to do a Proof-Of-Concept (POC) for one of our customers regarding Intune and deployment of large applications. Basically, they wanted to know how well Intune would work with application sizes in the 5 – 20 GB range. Obviously, this story is not going to end well, but please read […]

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A Geeks Guide to Windows 11 Deployment

By Johan Arwidmark / August 14, 2022

Just a quick post to announce that we have a released a free Ebook on Windows 11 deployment using ConfigMgr or MDT Lite Touch. 75 pages with step-by-step guides for Windows 11 imaging. To secure your copy, simply sign up for our newsletter on the Deployment News link in the banner above. eBook Outline: The […]

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Back to Basics – Driver Installation Order in WinPE Matters

By Johan Arwidmark / August 9, 2022

Ever having troubles about WinPE not finding your disk drive during deployment? Even though you added the correct drivers to it. Well, it can be as simple as your driver were added to the boot image in the wrong order. Did I get your attention? Well, there is more. 🙂 Some Hardware Vendors are Better […]

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Highlights from the July 21, 2022, Microsoft AMA on Windows Autopilot

By Johan Arwidmark / July 23, 2022

Here are my favorite topics, questions, and answers from the Microsoft AMA (Ask Me Anything) Windows Autopilot session on July 21, 2022. The recording from this live presentation as well as earlier AMA sessions is available on the main Windows IT Pro YouTube channel, and here is a direct link to the AMA Autopilot session: […]

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Mount-WindowsImage fails in WinPE

By Johan Arwidmark / July 18, 2022

This weekend I stumbled across an issue when trying to mount a driver package (WIM file) in WinPE via the Mount-WindowsImage cmdlet, part of the Dism PowerShell module from WinPE. The error that was shown was: Mount-WindowsImage : The 'Mount-WindowsImage' command was found in the module 'Dism', but the module could not be loaded. The […]

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