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
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
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
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