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Windows

Posts covering Windows 10/11

MSIX: Packaging

Katy Nicholson, 16 January, 2022

MSIX is a modern packaging solution designed to separate application and system states, and to be easy to cleanly uninstall. Some of this is performed by redirecting read/write to certain locations to a per-user/per-package folder, which can then cleanly be removed. In this post I will go through creating an MSIX package and how it can be deployed.

Removing Teams Chat from Windows 11

Katy Nicholson, 16 December, 2021

As you've probably already noticed, Windows 11 comes with a Teams client baked in. It's the shiny new Edge WebView2 client! Hooray no more Electron! Unfortunately it only supports personal accounts at the moment - so it's anything from a nuisance to added confusion on any sort of managed desktop. Luckily there are a few ways to get rid of it and I'll run through them here. It doesn't matter if you're on-prem, hybrid or pure Azure AD as there's a GPO setting and Intune policy setting to achieve this, as well as a Policy CSP/OMA URI if you want to use that instead.

Fixing a broken Windows Recovery partition

Katy Nicholson, 3 July, 2021

We've got a few Surface Go which I re-imaged using a Config Manager task sequence - this deletes all partitions and just sets up a basic recovery partition along with a big C partition, and installs Windows 10 Education. This is fine for our desktops and shared devices which can come in for another go through the task sequence if they need resetting. Moving forwards to personal devices, managed by Intune only and Azure AD joined (not hybrid, therefore no relationship with the Active Directory domain) I like features such as Wipe in Intune/Autopilot to work (along with the equivalent screen in Settings - Reset This PC). In this setup, Reset This PC does not work as the recovery partition doesn't contain the correct files. I had a look at how to fix this, and getting the re-built devices to reset into their original Windows 10 edition (Pro) with their original device embedded key. This worked quite well and I'll go through what I had to do in this post.

Cool Edge features

Katy Nicholson, 3 February, 2021

You must have heard about the new Edge by now - based on Chromium, replacing legacy Edge (and IE11). If not, have you been living under a rock?! I'm going to take a look at some of the neat features in Edge, at time of writing v89 is current. (Updated April 2021)

Analysing BSOD Memory Dumps

Katy Nicholson, 5 September, 2020

We had re-imaged all devices to Win 10 Edu 2004, after testing everything worked in a couple of rooms. All good, then the first day with teachers back and we get multiple calls about computers crashing with BSOD while the interactive whiteboards are being used. Whilst the user reported multiple crashes, when I went in person I wasn't able to cause it to crash so couldn't just look at the "What failed" bit on the Win 10 BSOD screen. A quick look at the system event log on one of the computers in question shows nothing useful - just "the computer has rebooted from a bugcheck". You can get the error code here too but no pointer as to what actually caused this.

Edge Chromium perfect configuration

Katy Nicholson, 21 August, 2020

So I've been trying to get the new Edge to open, sign in automatically with the current user's Azure AD credentials and then turn on sync, without any screens to click through or anything like that. I had got about as close as is possible - user opens the browser, it signs them in and asks if they want to sync or not. From version 86 there is a new GPO setting to force sync without prompting the user. Hooray!

Environment variables

Katy Nicholson, 14 August, 2020

As I've been configuring a bit of folder redirection in group policies, I often forget what environment variables there are (there's a lot more than you ever realise!) So I thought I'd list some environment variables that may be useful when editing GPOs or registry settings, and what they resolve to by default (assuming I'm logged in to the domain contoso.com as CONTOSO\Katy from contoso-wk-1), with my home drive set to map N: to \\file.contoso.com\users\katy

Locking down the Win+X menu

Katy Nicholson, 5 August, 2020

Whilst the Win+X menu is really useful for sys admins, there's quite a lot of items on there that I'd rather not have pupils clicking on (even if they'd not get anywhere due to not having access rights). It's possible to customise this menu and remove items you don't want from it. The shortcuts are stored (per user) in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\WinX in three folders - Group1, Group2 and Group3. I don't think it's possible to add custom shortcuts however deleting them will remove the corresponding item from the WinX menu.

Windows 10 and Super fast logon times

Katy Nicholson, 31 July, 2020

I've been working at really cutting down the initial logon times - started last year, and again with me rolling out Windows 10 2004 I've had to struggle to remember what I actually did, one of the main reasons for my blog is helping out future Katy as she is very forgetful :) This has always been something that has bugged me, as I remember in 2003 at university there was a Windows 2000/XP network with some sort of NetWare back end. The Windows 2000 PCs (libraries etc mostly) logged on in about 2 minutes, nice and speedy, but in the computing labs they ran XP and it was a 13 minute logon (literally 13 minutes as I timed it). Subsequent logons were also 13 minutes. Extremely frustrating, yet means I've always been dismissive of people complaining of a 90 second logon time.

Removing Windows User Profiles

Katy Nicholson, 13 July, 2020

Just a quick one for today. I'm going through a bunch of laptops which have loads of old directories in C:\Users, in the form of Username, Username.Domain, Username.Domain.000, 001 etc. Most of these don't exist as profiles if you query CIM for win32_userprofile (and aren't in the registry at the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. So I've knocked up a script which goes through the "official" profile list, deletes everything that isn't System/LocalService/NetworkService or the user running the script, and then goes through clearing anything that is left on disk (excluding the above plus the Public folder).

Windows 10, UEFI and PXE booting

Katy Nicholson, 8 June, 2018

I recently set up System Centre Configuration Manager to take over from MDT for imaging PCs. The end result I'm after is that all PCs attempt PXE boot when powered up, and then automatically image if there's a task deployment waiting for them. (Bonus points is getting wake-on-lan to work with Win 10 so they'll power themselves up too). Thought this would be easy - surely just set network as the first boot device - only to discover that (on a UEFI booted system) part of Windows setup adds "Windows Boot Manager" and sets it as the first device in the boot list, no way to stop it. I've come up with a powershell script which uses bcdedit to mess with the boot order - first it looks for an entry containing "IP4", grabs its ID then sets this as the default. For some reason just being default doesn't mean it's the first in the list - so it then changes the boot order to network followed by Boot Manager.

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