technology – Out of Office Hours
Posts about technology written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
Posts about technology written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
Posts about ergonomics written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
Posts about PC Hardware written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
3 posts published by Michael Niehaus during August 2025| Out of Office Hours
The number didn’t manage to flip over to 5 million while I was still awake, but it had passed that threshold this morning: Yes, that’s the number of views from the https://oofhours.com […]| Out of Office Hours
As Rudy Ooms discovered on the Microsoft 365 Message Center, bulletin MC1134168 announced a change coming with the September 2025 cumulative update: You’ll be able to install updates at the end of […]| Out of Office Hours
For a long time, I’ve used three displays attached to my MacBook Pro (well, four counting the Mac’s display): One 32″ monitor in the center, flanked by two 27″ displays, one…| Out of Office Hours
5 posts published by Michael Niehaus during May 2024| Out of Office Hours
4 posts published by Michael Niehaus during January 2024| Out of Office Hours
Michael Niehaus' technology ramblings| Out of Office Hours
Over three years ago (yikes), I did a blog post that talked about renaming Hybrid AADJ devices after they have been deployed via Windows Autopilot. As I was revisiting that for an upcoming presenta…| Out of Office Hours
If you’re going to be in Minneapolis next month for the EUC World Amplify event, being held from August 4-7 on the University of Minnesota campus, be sure to look me up — I’ll be …| Out of Office Hours
In the “it’s about time” category, this one popped up on Bluesky today from Tero Alhonen: It’s time to start paying attention to the new Insider builds in the dev channel, since […]| Out of Office Hours
The latest “what’s new” doc update for Intune includes this tidbit: So now you can restrict ARM64 apps appropriately. Considering how many years ago this was first discussed, it&#…| Out of Office Hours
13 posts published by Michael Niehaus during June 2024| Out of Office Hours
I had talked about the Windows Package Manager, WINGET.EXE, in a previous blog, but one thing always made me wonder: How do those actually work? I mean certainly the app packages contai…| Out of Office Hours
10 posts published by Michael Niehaus during May 2025| Out of Office Hours
Version 3.1.0 is now available with a variety of fixed based on customer feedback. See the release information for more details: https://github.com/mtniehaus/AutopilotBranding/releases/tag/3.1.0 Note that this version doesn’t use IntuneWinAppUtil.exe directly. Instead, the […]| Out of Office Hours
Autopilot v2, a.k.a. Autopilot device preparation, was announced on May 22, 2024, it wasn’t really done yet. From the original annoucement (highlight added by me): Not sure about what they consider “soon” […]| Out of Office Hours
In my previous post about pre-provisioning, I showed three apps (MDT, Office, and PowerToys) that I was installing as part of a task sequence. What I didn’t show was the details for […]| Out of Office Hours
Over a year ago when Autopilot v2 (a.k.a. device preparation) was announced, one of the missing features was pre-provisioning (formerly “white glove provisioning”). Maybe one of these days it will finally emerge. […]| Out of Office Hours
When Microsoft announced Autopilot v2 (a.k.a. Autopilot device provisioning), they mentioned: Hybrid AD join is no longer recommended for use with Autopilot deployments. Autopilot device preparation profiles do not support Hybrid AD […]| Out of Office Hours
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
The title says it all — well, not quite because the full description is more involved and nuanced. This post on LinkedIn from Sameer Agarwal, an Intune engineer at Microsoft, explains more: […]| Out of Office Hours
In preparation for an MMSMOA 2025 session where I am talking about the Autopilot Branding package (among other things), I figured it was a good time to look through the feedback, issues, […]| Out of Office Hours
I was working on some changes to the Autopilot Branding package and testing them out on Windows 11 24H2 and noticed a problem: One of the registry values I was trying to […]| Out of Office Hours
When you initially sign into Windows, by default you’ll see the “pulsing color” screen as first-time “things” are done in the background: You can disable that “first sign-in animation” via GPO, MDM […]| 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
Posts about Microsoft Intune written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
I’ve seen a lot of blog posts about registering devices with Windows Autopilot, either at a command prompt in OOBE (Shift-F10, run PowerShell) or as part of some other automation. Now with Au…| 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
TL;DR: SCCM maintenance tasks for WSUS no longer work if you are using WSUS with the Windows Internal Database (WID). When looking at the SCCM wsyncmgr.log, I noticed some SQL exceptions that […]| Out of Office Hours
Microsoft enabled automatic updates for PowerShell with the release of PowerShell 7.2; that continues now with PowerShell 7.4. If you’re devices are updated from Windows Update directly and you’ve enabled updates when […]| Out of Office Hours
I spent a lot of time in the weeds around Windows licensing, but I’d prefer to forget it all. Sadly, that’s usually not an option, especially as I work on Windows imaging […]| Out of Office Hours
I have merged in changes from the community to create a new release on GitHub, which you can find here: You can find the release notes on the release itself: Follow the links to the pull requests (…| 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
After a long time working exclusively on Windows devices, I had switched to MacOS on a MacBook Pro a few years ago because that was the practical thing to do while working […]| Out of Office Hours
After years of neglect, no one was terribly surprised when Microsoft said that MDT would not support Windows 11. Even prior to that, it was often up to the community to keep […]| 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
Sometimes I would like to try something and have it “just work.” Today was not one of those times. The task was simple: I want to try to use CMPivot to query […]| Out of Office Hours
Six conferences in one week, and boy am I tired. Well, really it was six events in one, all in the same place (Orlando) at the same time. But it was still […]| Out of Office Hours
If you are using Windows 10 or 11 (i.e. everyone), you are using Delivery Optimization (DO) to download all sorts of things — see Phil Wilcock’s post for a good overview of […]| Out of Office Hours
Yes, Windows 11 24H2 is available to everyone (after being ARM64-only for a few months). As usual, there are a number of related items updated at the same time: What is available […]| Out of Office Hours
The Snapdragon Dev Kit, an ARM64 desktop PC running the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite CPU, was announced at Build 2024 back in May 2024, and was supposed to ship in June. […]| Out of Office Hours
Triggered by the publishing of documentation for Windows Server 2025 about features removed or no longer being developed, Microsoft published a separate post explicitly calling out one of those items: WSUS. While […]| Out of Office Hours
Remember the change planned for October to start installing updates during OOBE? The one that didn’t have any controls? The one that interrupts the Autopilot user-driven flow by rebooting the computer in […]| Out of Office Hours
I had a need to compare two directories to see what differences existed between them. In the past, I had used utilities like WinDiff and WinMerge to do that, but I was […]| Out of Office Hours
Here’s a blast from the past: a document that I wrote many years ago about Windows RT in the Enterprise. We all remember how that went, right? This particular document version, which […]| Out of Office Hours
That might seem like an obvious statement: the OneDrive client is updated frequently, so of course the version of OneDrive that is included in Windows 10 and 11 media is going to […]| Out of Office Hours
It’s been just over a month since I posted the Microsoft giveth, Microsoft taketh blog post (which, ironically, is one of the top posts on the site), and I think I’ve finally […]| Out of Office Hours
I have to change my mind. While a clean install of the 24H2 Insider Preview ISO (26100.560) does have WMIC as an installed-by-default feature, the updated 26100.712 version does not. I guess whoeve…| Out of Office Hours
Read all of the posts by Michael Niehaus on Out of Office Hours| 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
Posts about microsoft written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
Posts about Windows Autopilot written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
A while back, I noticed that updates were installing at the end of the Autopilot process, after device ESP had completed and before the user signed in. Per Microsoft’s post, this is now going…| Out of Office Hours
Microsoft published KB5043950 which describes an issue where the Defender for Endpoint agent (Sense client) isn’t installed as expected on Windows 11 24H2. This can happen when a device is up…| 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
I always thought the process of creating Windows USB media was pretty simple: take a USB key, format it as FAT32, then XCOPY the contents of an ISO to that USB key. But there are some complications…| Out of Office Hours
It’s always the simple things that turn out to be more complicated than expected. I was deploying new machines with Windows 11 and needed to automate the process of adding PowerShell 7.4 and …| Out of Office Hours
Posts about Windows 11 written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
Back in 2023, I posted a Media Tool app (which uses PowerShell behind the scenes) to download Windows 10 or 11 media, for both x64 and ARM64 architectures. I’ve now uploaded a new version of …| 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
Posts about autopilot written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
Posts about Windows 11 written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
Posts about Windows 10 written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
Posts about Windows Autopilot written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
Posts about PowerShell written by Michael Niehaus| Out of Office Hours
Phil Wilcock posted a blog last week with details about “non-peerable” content, pointing to Microsoft’s official documentation about what is and isn’t “peerable.”…| Out of Office Hours
In the slow march to its final death, the Microsoft Store for Business (and presumably the Microsoft Store for Education as well) has removed the ability to add, edit, and remove Autopilot devices.…| 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
On May 1st, Microsoft e-mailed me to congratulate me: Today, the e-mail was to take that away: The basic justification given for that was that the Intune product group was not comfortable sharing N…| 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
After doing a clean install of Windows 11 24H2 (Insider Preview), I noticed that there was a new “Learn about this picture” icon on the desktop. There’s nothing I hate more than s…| Out of Office Hours
You’ve probably run into a scenario like this before and never understood why: You assign a new, seemingly harmless policy into a configuration profile in Intune, and now the device reboots a…| Out of Office Hours
Microsoft announced more of the timeline for VBScript this past week: Windows 11 24H2 makes it a removable “feature on demand” (FOD), and sometime in 2027 is expected to be turned off b…| 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
Back in 2022, I did a post about using the MDM terms of use page (which is almost never actually used since Azure AD now has a better solution as part of conditional access) to prompt for informati…| Out of Office Hours
I’ve been used to the routine: If an app fails to install during Autopilot with ESP monitoring the progress, you don’t find out about it right away. Instead, you would have to wait unti…| Out of Office Hours
If you are doing user-driven Windows Autopilot provisioning in combination with a ConfigMgr task sequence initiated via “Co-management settings” in Intune, you know that the task sequen…| 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
I noticed a section on the Features in development page that talks about a change coming on April 1st, which is not very far away (and an interesting place to put “we’re going to break …| 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
