So you may have seen a couple of blogs about an undocumented feature in Windows 7. This feature allows you to create a folder which then gives access to a large number of shortcuts. The feature has been christened “GodMode” by many bloggers – and I should...

As the final installment in my Windows 7 holiday series, have a look at what is being left for Santa at our house.  These were made from dough from my wife’s batch of Snickerdoodles.  (It’s the final installment because these projects are causing...

A while back I wrote two articles for TechNet Magazine describing a set of tools to work around a number of shortcomings when trying to elevate some types of tasks in Windows Vista and higher with User Account Control enabled.  I have even written...

The DevCon utility acts as a command-line version of Device Manager. Using DevCon, you can enable, disable, restart, update, remove, and query individual devices or groups of devices.  However, because this utility is not part of the operating system...

Before I became a “Deployment Guy”, I used to be an “Active Directory Guy” and worked on quite a few Active Directory deployments and migrations.  When users, groups, and computers are migrated to a new domain, the resources (files, shares, user...

As some of you may have noticed, we have a new Deployment Guy, Samesh Singh . As you can see from Samesh’s BIO here , he is from Australia and is an expert in deployment technologies. He has already gotten off to a great start by posting an excellent...

Since I’m the newbie in the Deployment Guys, I thought I’d take a step back to Windows Vista to discuss an issue that is not strictly deployment, but affects a deployment, and the steady state of an environment. I should also add that most of the investigative...

ConfigMgr allows for great extensibility to perform right click actions. You can find information on this here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc143056.aspx . Those of you that have done this before know that the first step is digging through...

In a recent blog post , Mark Russinovich wrote about the implications of having duplicate machine Security Identifiers (machine SIDs).  As it turns out, there are likely very few situations where having duplicate machine SIDs causes issues. ...

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...

Please enjoy this delicious Windows 7 treat baked by my lovely wife.  (Can’t wait to taste it.  J )   Happy Thanksgiving from the Deployment Guys.   Disclaimer: The information on this site is provided "AS IS" with no warranties...

I was asked by our Support folks to let you know about an issue that effects Windows 7 when you try to set the desktop wallpaper through Group Policy. I am blogging this on the Deployment Guys blog because the issue can be avoided by a configuration item...

Since my latest Windows 7 “project” turned out so well, I though I’d share it with you. Yes, I did carve this intricate design myself.  :-)   Have a Happy Halloween from the Deployment Guys.   Disclaimer: The information on this site is...

I have written several posts on this topic before. However, changes were made to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that warrant a full revisit of this topic. This post can can also be also be found on the Windows Springboard Series blog here . ...

You’ve no doubt read some of the benefits around using the Software Update Point features of ConfigMgr. However, if you are already using MDT standalone as an Image Engineering environment – there is sometimes a duplication in having to manage software...

There is a great eBook that has just been released on the Microsoft website that gives a good insight into many of the technologies and concepts that you’ll need to consider and address for when you start working on your Windows 7 deployment, and the...

So I don’t know about you but I have a very distinct love hate relationship with the Office 2007 Customisation Wizard. I just love the amount of tweaking I can do and I just hate the fact that I can tweak so much. In past I have found that tweaking as...

MDT 2010 supports encrypting disks with BitLocker during deployment.  This is configured in the Task Sequence using the following: This works for the Operating System Drive. If configuration of Bitlocker is tried on additional drives, the deployment...

In some environments, network device drivers and/or infrastructure take longer to load than WinPE waits before running the task sequence. This can be due to congested DHCP scopes, link negotiation latency or slow loading network drivers. In these cases...

15 Feb 2010 Update – To use techniques found in this post with MDT 2010 you will need to use one of the workarounds described in this post:  http://blogs.technet.com/deploymentguys/archive/2010/02/15/using-convertbooleantostring-with-ztigather-wsf...

Update 11 December 2009 – A few changes and additions inspired by the work being done by fellow MSC Senior Consultant Steven Markegene.  Of note are the changes to the Hyper-V model strings and a new one added by Steven.  The script download...

Yesterday the MDT team in Redmond released MDT2010 to the web for download. There is a blog posting with the location for download here: http://blogs.technet.com/msdeployment/archive/2009/09/09/mdt-2010-is-released.aspx Or you can go to the following...

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...

Working on customer site recently I was perplexed by why I could not create an unattend.xml file from within MDT 2010 for my custom Windows 7 x32 image. So I did some digging and finally located a program manager who could explain to me what was going...

When working on deployment projects, there is often a requirement for a workstation to be customised on a location by location basis. Common workstation customisations which are applied in this manner include: Localisation settings (locales, keyboard...