Happy new year to everyone! It looks like I am making the first blog post here for 2012 :-) To get the year rolling I thought I'd share anexcellent resource that I stumbled across this week, even though it was published back in November. If you follow the link below you can download a printable overview...

I've had this tool sitting in a folder on my laptop half-finished for a few months but after a particularly frustrating problem with a script in a ZTI deployment I was encouraged to finish it! The original MDTDebugger that I wrote is a great help for debugging tasks running in a litetouch (LTI) deployment...

Often times when you are presenting applications to install in the LiteTouch wizard of MDT, you may want to present configurations for each of these applications. These could include installing application features, configuring parameters like computer name, language or parameters that link to other...

One of the great features of MDT 2010/2012 is the ability to create a media based deployment  – this media based deployment can be placed on a USB based memory device (HDD or Fob) or onto a DVD. This allows the MDT based deployment to run from this removable media which is great for badly connected...

I can't profess to be an Application Compatibility guru like Chris Jackson or Aaron Margosis , but I do work on a lot of deployment projects where I am tasked with helping the client with this area. As such, I have compiled a list of the top 5 most common Application Compatibility mistakes/not-recommended...

One of the most requested windows7 customization in every deployment projects is the OS branding. Here is a quick step by step guide. Windows Background Picture: If you want to assign a Win7 Background & Logon picture based on the size of the Monitor we recommend to create a picture that looks...

For a while I have been meaning to write up a solution around dynamic computer naming in Zero Touch. Many people have emailed or commenting on how useful this would be – so here goes. Zero Touch Installation relies on a combination of System Centre Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) and Microsoft...

Each time I work on a Windows deployment project, App-V figures more and more in the conversations that I have with customers. It is, in my opinion, now a vital tool that is needed in order to successfully migrate an existing platform (or deploy a new one) to Windows 7. The uses for App-V vary but two...

Often the simplest tips are the best ones, so here is one I have been using pretty much ever since I started working with MDT. When working as part of a team in the same MDT environment, you can often run into issues when various people are modifying the task sequence, or debugging a process that...

If you are planning to customise your Office 2010 deployment significantly, then at some point, you will more than likely need to make changes to the registry. Perhaps you wrote a custom add-in that you need to define (In “ HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins ”), or maybe you want to tweak the...

As some of our regular readers will have seen, I released version 2.0 of the MDT Debugger a short time ago. This version 2.1 is just a minor update with the following changes/improvements: Fixed a bug in the output window that caused some process output not to be captured and displayed Added...

Back in March of last year, I posted the MDT Debugger as a time/stress and frustration saving tool useful for debugging the scripts you develop for use with MDT. Over the last year, I've used the tool in every MDT project that I have worked on, which has given me the opportunity to (very slowly) address...

In a previous post , I described the first of two methods on how to drastically reduce the time (and stress/frustration!) it takes to debug an MDT task sequence, by eliminating all the tasks that work. In this post, I’d like to close this topic with the second of the two methods on how to achieve...

I don't know about you but it frustrates me that, to test certain parts of a task sequence, I have to run the entire task sequence from the very beginning, formatting the drive and installing the WIM image. This can be a process that can take an hour just to reach the point I want to test, causing a...

It's been a while, but I'll now continue this series of basic tips in the hope to help avoid some deployment unpleasantness that you might rub shoulders with at some point! In this post I'll explain 5 common errors that people make when configuring their newly deployed Windows 7, and what you should...

A request that I have had from a number of customers lately goes like this: “ we would like to have MDT 2010 download and apply all critical and security updates during image engineering from the Internet, but the device we are using as a reference machine is in the lab network which doesn't get Group...

I wanted to highlight a new solutions accelerator that has been published, which I think is particularly relevant to deployment because it is something that I have to address in most of the deployment projects I work on. The guide is called "Windows User State Virtualisation (USV)" and discusses the...

One of the things I like the most about MDT is the level that it can be customised; you can edit the HTA screens, the provided scripts or even use existing ones to build you own. This level of flexibility allows you to achieve pretty much anything in a deployment, once you have worked out how to do it...

Often when debugging a Windows deployment you might need to know the value that has been assigned to a particular variable. With a LiteTouch installation this is easy, you can just read the variables.dat file, or write a simple VBS/WSF script that displays a MsgBox() window showing the variable you want...

Unless you are on holiday in Spain for the relevant dates, and you also want to break up your holiday with an exciting day of IT, this blog post won't be too relevant for you. However, if you are one of our readers living in Spain, then read on! I'll be speaking at an event that Microsoft is organising...

Here is a simple tip that I thought I'd share in the hope that you don't need to lose a few hours of your life trying to work out what is wrong with your SCCM client sotware install! I was onsite with a client recently trying to upgrade some Windows XP computers to Windows 7. However, trying to install...

edit: fixed error in command line example. Thanks to Aurélien Bonnin and FoW for pointing it out. edit 2 : this version has been updated, please search the blog for the latest version. When creating and configuring an LTI deployment solution there is one thing that always bugs me immensly...

Adding 802.1x functionality to WinPE has been a hot topic for a while now. And, given the amount of traffic and comments that my earlier post generated when I linked to the newly released updates for WinPE that add this long awaited support, it seems that a lot of people are interested in implementing...

When you pre-load an OEM build on machines, they are usually set-up to perform Mini-setup as soon as they come up. Customers sometimes have difficulties ensuring that these machines boot to WinPE using boot media or PXE rather than simply performing Mini-setup using input from the user. Usually, if this...

Back in June I posted a script that I’d written that displays the progress of the USMT capture and recover phases in a neat HTML window off to one side of the screen; particularly useful if you are capturing/recovering large amounts of data because otherwise it looked like the USMT progress had hung...