After being pinged by Niall Brady on X (Twitter) today, I started to play around a bit with Hyper-V in Windows 11 24H2 on a few ARM64 Devices from Microsoft, HP, and Lenovo. Here are my notes: 1. Windows 11 24H2 has a new guest VM configuration version: 12.0, compared to 11.0 in Windows 11 […]
Upgrade Experience Indicators are not new to Windows 11; they exist for Windows 10, too. In this post, you will learn how to use them to determine Windows 11 Upgrade Readiness. Background – Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser Upgrade Experience Indicators are registry values created by the Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser task, a scheduled task found in the […]
I recently learned that WinGet 1.8 could be used to download store applications, but when trying out the command suggested here (winget download Calculator -s msstore) from the official link: Use WinGet 1.8 to download Microsoft Store apps | Windows IT Pro Blog it would fail to download the license. After a bit of troubleshooting, […]
During the ViaMonstra Online Office Hours in July we got a question about creating an unattend.xml file that would deploy Windows 11 directly into OOBE, primarily intended for self-registration into Windows Autopilot. A scenario where the technician presses Shift-F10 in OOBE, and either upload the hardware hash, or creates the corporate device identifier, and then […]
When adding in a ConfigMgr boot image not matching the currently installed Windows ADK version you quickly learn that several tabs are missing from the boot image properties. This is common when you want to try boot images from a new Windows ADK version, without upgrading Windows ADK on the ConfigMgr Site Server, for example […]
For those of you that upgraded to ConfigMgr 2403, you may have noticed that some console extensions, like the MDT extensions, will cause the ConfigMgr console to crash. Credits: Thank you Ahmed Essam at Dell for sharing your findings with the community! Symptom When trying use any of the MDT console extensions, you get an […]
Here is a guide on setting up ConfigMgr 2403 or later to deploy Windows 11 for ARM64 to a compatible device. In my case I was deploying the Lenovo X13s Gen 1 laptop that is a ARM64 device (the CPU is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, and the GPU is a Qualcomm Adreno 690). […]
Here is a list of the Configuration Manager (SCCM) PowerShell module changes in version 2403. So far only the Save-CMSoftwareUpdate changes has been documented, but I have found a few more changes when poking around in the 2403 PowerShell module.
Here are some quick examples on configuring NTFS permissions using PowerShell. The first example is using the takeown.exe and icacls.exe commands driven by PowerShell, and the second example is using the takeown.exe and native Get-Acl and Set-Acl PowerShell cmdlets. Credits: Thanks to Gary Blok for showing me the Get-Acl and Set-Acl PowerShell cmdlets. Option #1 […]
A few weeks back I got a question on how to remove applications from a Windows 11 image. Now, obviously you can run a script on any existing Windows 11 installation to remove unwanted applications, and there are plenty of scripts out there doing that. For example, this script: Remove Built-in Windows 11 apps leveraging […]
Since Microsoft don't officially support Windows 11 Deployments with MDT, nor supporting any Windows ADK version newer than Windows ADK for Windows 10, version 1809 (build 17763), it's up to the OSD community to make it work. On the good side, with millions of MDT downloads during the years, you're not exactly alone 🙂 NOTE: […]
Unlike when using Windows Admin Center to manage your Hyper-V VMs, Hyper-V Manager, nor the built-in cmdlets, offer any native VM cloning function. But with a bit of creative scripting, it's certainly doable. Here is a script that clones a virtual machine in Hyper-V: Update 3/8/2025: I added a fix to prevent trying to import any […]
Here is a quick guide on how to disable Data Deduplication. In this example I disabled Data Deduplication for my F: volume. 1. Make sure no applications or services are writing data to the volume. 2. Check the actual size of your content, and make sure you have the space available on the disk (with […]
Last week I got a question about deploying Hyper-V hosts via MDT Lite touch, so here is a quick guide. In this example I'm assuming you have imported an operating system to the Deployment Workbench. In my example I was using a Windows Server 2019 image. Update March 13, 2024: Added info on how to […]
Using nested VMs is perfect for demos or smaller labs in the way you can have the entire setup, multiple VMs, contained in a single VM and a single virtual hard drive (VHDX). This VM can be shared with others and can be used to easily revert to a good checkpoint for the entire lab […]
In my lab I try to keep a somewhat consistent naming standard for the virtual hard disks (VHDX Files) I use for my VMs. Every now and then I miss, or I rename a VM later, and there wants to change the name of the VHDX file. In this post you learn how to change […]
In this post you find a PowerShell script that launches BGInfo and displays the media expiration date for a ConfigMgr Standalone Media. Credits: Thank you, Michael Niehaus, for the code snippet that converted the UTC based time stamp to a date value us mere mortals can read 🙂 Update February 2, 2024: If you don't […]
In our trainings we get this question a lot, so I figured I should write it down… The question is: In a Co-managed environment, how can I manage drivers and firmware updates using the new control plane in Intune without switching the workload for updates to Intune? Basically, you want to manage quality updates with […]
When creating ConfigMgr task sequences you learn that ConfigMgr assigns different types to them. This type is available as the _SMSTSType task sequence variable during deployment, and also available in the ConfigMgr database, as the TS_Type column in the vSMS_TaskSequencePackage view. The values are: Credits: Thanks to Boushev Gleb for the initial find But what […]
Unless you have been totally off grid the last few weeks or so, 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 during November 27-30, 2023-. The Microsoft Technical Takeoff event was combination of about live AMA (Ask Microsoft […]