Hi all, it’s been a while! Work keeps me quite busy these days, which unfortunately has resulted in this site not receiving much love. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgot about it!

To tide things over until my next guide, how about some screenshots of the next version of Windows?

This past week, to Microsoft’s detriment, a leaked build of Windows 11 made its way onto the web. For those in the industry, witnessing the Windows Autopilot experience firsthand can be quite valuable insight, so I’ve gone ahead and provisioned a device for Autopilot (uploaded its hash) as I simply couldn’t wait until next week’s proper reveal. 🙂

Obligatory warning: I would not advise anyone acquiring and installing a random ISO published by potentially nefarious individuals. What you’ll see below was deployed in a Virtual environment, sectioned off from the rest of my network, leveraging a dev/test Intune tenant. Don’t try this at home.

Continue reading “Leaked Windows 11 Build 21996.1 – Windows Autopilot Experience”

Update (10/23/17): Microsoft has provided a new GPO in 1709 ADMX that (helps) resolve this issue!  Go here and learn what’s needed.

So, this is an extremely frustrating situation I recently ran into within the organization I work for. Following the Official Microsoft Installation Procedures, I installed SCCM CB 1702 and configured Windows 10 updates using System Center Configuration Manager (see here).

Continue reading “Why are my Windows 10 Devices updating via Microsoft Update and not SCCM?”

Note: This post is a targeted to a certain Enterprise Audience and therefore will be very straightforward with less pleasantries and/or screenshots.

The Problem

If you’re like me, and after testing the various Windows 10 editions, landed on the LTSB as your favorite, you may be having some issues if you use DirectAccess.

Continue reading “Make DirectAccess Work on Win 10 LTSB”

Microsoft has listened. In my previous Creating Customized Windows 8.1 Media post, I detailed how to deploy a customized Windows 8.1 image utilizing UEFI with two different USB flash drives. The need for two drives stemmed from the fact that Microsoft removed split WIM support, thus resulting in a single file greater than 4096 MB, which isn’t allowed on FAT32 partitions – the requirement for UEFI boot. Utilizing two drives allowed us to UEFI boot off one FAT32 drive, but have the WIM on a second NTFS formatted drive.

Continue reading “Windows 10 Brings Back Split WIM Support”

In Part 1 we used Hyper-V to build, update, and sysprep our custom Windows 8.1 Installation. Now we need to make some Install media!

If you’re unfamiliar with this process, or you haven’t built customized Windows media since the XP days, you may not be familiar with WIM files. Essentially, the WIM file is a compressed image which is deployed during Windows installation. (Think of it like extracting a large .ZIP file.) If you take a look at your Windows 8.1 install media, you’ll find that amongst the plethora of files, the largest will be \Sources\install.wim – approximately 3.1 GB on x64 media.

Continue reading “Creating Customized Windows 8.1 Media (ISO, WIM, Flash Drive) | Part 2”

I’m sure this is something everyone has (or will) have to tackle at some point in their Windows IT career – creating a customized version of Windows for the office, for the enterprise, or for a specific one-off scenario. I’ve gone through the steps many times, and each time I seem to do things a little bit differently.

Recently, I wanted to create my own customized version of Windows 8.1 Enterprise. This isn’t for work, it’s for me. I’m constantly having to reimage my PC(s) for personal projects, and I got tired of re-downloading all the updates and re-installing all my apps. This is something I had been putting off for a while, but now that it’s completed, I wanted to document the steps I took, and more importantly, what worked.

Continue reading “Creating Customized Windows 8.1 Media (ISO, WIM, Flash Drive) | Part 1”