2025-05-30: Added a section at the bottom based on social media chatter. Microsoft has been investing quite a bit of effort into adding new functionality into Notepad, including AI functionality to…| Out of Office Hours
I’ve done a few troubleshooting blog posts over the years, and they are easily the most popular on my site. This one in particular is still going strong (#1 post of all time), almost five yea…| Out of Office Hours
Back when Autopilot v2 was announced, and carried over into the documentation, is a claim: [Windows Autopilot device preparation, a.k.a. Autopilot v2] reduces the time IT spends on deploying device…| Out of Office Hours
I have one big Hyper-V server, currenting running Windows Server 2022 Datacenter, that I use for lots of things (with 12 cores, 272GB RAM, 8TB of disk space). Upgrading it to Windows Server 2025 sh…| Out of Office Hours
I could stop there, but I won’t. In any case, let’s review the Windows Enterprise SKU licensing model, straight from the source: Windows 11 Enterprise is licensed as an upgrade license …| Out of Office Hours
It’s something that I hadn’t tried in a while: Capturing a custom Windows 11 image using MDT. But there were a few posts on Reddit commenting about challenges doing so, so I thought I&#…| Out of Office Hours
A long time ago, the original marketing materials for Windows Autopilot (before it had a name) were created by the engineers working on the product. It pitched Autopilot as a way to simplifying the…| Out of Office Hours
While doing some Autopilot (v1) pre-provisioning work using the latest Windows 11 Insider Canary ring build (27695), I noticed a new item in the UI: If you try it out, you can see a rough version o…| Out of Office Hours
Windows PowerShell 5.1, the version that’s built into Windows, shipped back in 2016 with the release of Windows 10 1607 and Windows Server 2016, with support for older OSes back to Windows 7 …| Out of Office Hours
I mentioned in my previous post that I was able to use “Co-management Authority” (a.k.a. “Co-management settings”) to install the ConfigMgr agent and then initiate a task se…| Out of Office Hours
If you missed it this past week, let me first point you to the source: Windows deployment with the next generation of Windows Autopilot So what did this blog tell you? Certainly that there are chan…| Out of Office Hours
Provisioning a new device can be done in ways other than with Windows Autopilot. Let’s look at some scenarios implemented in Workspace ONE that leverage technologies that have been around sin…| Out of Office Hours
In the first part, I set up Workspace ONE and integrated it into my existing Entra ID (Azure AD) tenant. In part 2, I set up apps and policies that should be deployed to my devices. That prepares m…| Out of Office Hours
In the first part, I got to the point where I could successfully get a device into a managed state, but that doesn’t mean the device is actually usable. To get it to that state, I need to dep…| Out of Office Hours
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years talking to ISVs about provisioning Windows devices, but I’ve never actually used any non-Microsoft solutions for doing that. In that time, one of…| Out of Office Hours
My first thoughts around Autopilot v2 (a.k.a. Autopilot device preparation) are scattered through a week of posts: Digging into Windows Autopilot v2 Windows Autopilot v2 experience: Some surprises …| Out of Office Hours
One of the things that is not currently included in the APv2 device preparation policy is an option to configure the computer name, so as a result the devices end up being given a random name like …| Out of Office Hours
People have made fun of Microsoft’s progress bars for decades. We’ve all seen examples, e.g. file copies that show days, then minutes, then hours; “updating Windows” message…| Out of Office Hours
The social media DMs, e-mails, and blog comments around Autopilot v2 have raised a bunch of questions, interesting points, speculation, opinions, etc. I figured it would be useful to summarize thos…| Out of Office Hours
Now that my “real” lab tenant has been updated, I can easily try it out. I set up a new unregistered VM, created a new Autopilot device preparation profile that targeted “All user…| Out of Office Hours
Yes, I know the official name is “Windows Autopilot Device Preparation.” But that’s too much of a mouthful and doesn’t really even describe what this is, other than “s…| Out of Office Hours
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 i…| Out of Office Hours
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 usefu…| Out of Office Hours
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 …| Out of Office Hours
It seemed like a simple question: Can you figure out what’s in an ESD file without download the whole file? I’ve been manipulating data like this quite a bit over the past couple of day…| Out of Office Hours
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? I suppose …| Out of Office Hours
The whole Windows app (UWP) model is weird: apps are installed per user, but the files for those apps are shared between users. That leads to situations where there are several different versions o…| Out of Office Hours
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…| Out of Office Hours
