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Troubleshooting Windows Deployments, take #2
Traveling from New Zealand to Australia for the TechEd Australia conference, I had some additional time to work on the troubleshooting guide, which is now starting to feel more like a book. I added...
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Using the Windows Performance Toolkit
Inside the new Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) that was released back in August is a component called the Windows Performance Toolkit. I’ve talked about this at various events over the...
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MDT 2012 Update 1 has been updated
For those of you using ConfigMgr 2012, you may be interested in this. When ConfigMgr 2012 Cumulative Update 1 was released, it was discovered that you could no longer create a new task sequence using...
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MDT 2012 Update 1: Roles and Features improvements
Apparently I was so wrapped up in the MDT 2012 Update 1 development process that I forgot to talk about one of the areas that consumed weeks of my time before the MDT 2012 Update 1 release:...
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MDT 2012 Update 1: Deploy to VHD
I was working on a separate blog posting (to be posted soon) that referenced the “Deploy to VHD” support that was present in MDT 2012 and improved in MDT 2012 Update 1 and wanted to include a link to...
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Experimenting with a RAMdisk
One of the slow operations in the MDT Deployment Workbench is the initial “Update deployment share” process that has to completely generate new Lite Touch boot images. I always assumed that this was...
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More experimenting with RAMdisks: Using a VM completely in RAM
In my previous post, I talked about using a small RAMdisk to speed up the process of generating MDT boot images. But the trial version only supports RAMdisks up to 4GB in size and only on client OSes....
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Using boot from VHD and differencing disks
MDT 2012 includes a task sequence for deploying an operating system into a VHD, setting up the computer for booting from that VHD. See my previous blog posting about Deploy to VHD for more details on...
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User groups in the Seattle area
You would expect that having Microsoft in the Seattle area would result in having a plethora of Microsoft-related users groups around. But over the years, I’ve found that these are somewhat hard to...
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Sometimes it’s the little things…
I’ve been building SMS and ConfigMgr environments for over 17 years now. You would think that in that amount of time I would be able to do this without pulling my hair out. Most of the time that is...
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Grabbing out-of-box drivers from a Windows 8 system
It seems like a common request: I’ve got a brand new system, right out of the box from the OEM. It has all the drivers on it that are needed. So rather than find and download those same drivers from...
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Ensuring custom GPO packs are copied to linked deployment shares
It’s been a surprisingly common question in the past few weeks – how come MDT doesn’t copy custom GPO packs to linked deployment shares? Well, it’s been like that since support for GPO packs was added...
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MDT 2013: What’s changed?
I did a session at TechEd New Zealand a few weeks ago talking about what’s changed in MDT 2013. As part of that session, I put together a list of all the changes in the MDT 2013 release, comparing all...
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The ADK for Windows 8.1 has been updated
With the general availability of Windows 8.1, a new update to the Assessment and Deployment Kit for Windows 8.1 has been posted to the Microsoft Download Center. See...
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Have you submitted your MDT feedback?
Several people have asked me recently about desired features in MDT, which is great – but it would be even better to see this information submitted through the Connect website. To do this, please...
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Download some free books…
Many of you will be traveling or taking vacations over the holiday season and might be looking for some content to fill up your e-readers or tablets. Microsoft Press has released quite a few e-books...
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Migrating from Windows XP to Windows 8.1 using MDT 2013
Most people using MDT at this point have made the migration to Windows 7 and are looking at MDT 2013 to help with getting to Windows 8.1. But there are a number of stragglers who are looking to go...
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Configuring file associations in Windows 8.1
When you are using Windows 8.1 (or Windows 8, which behaves the same way), you may notice that some file types (mapped by file extension) are opened by modern apps while others may be opened by desktop...
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Ten years and counting
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been working for Microsoft for that long already – time flies. During that time, I’ve had a few different jobs and titles: consultant, systems design engineer, software...
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Another Windows 8.1 Update tip
With the Windows 8.1 Update’s release to MSDN yesterday, people are discovering the various improvements in the new release. Here’s one that I noticed in PC Settings:See the new “Manage known...
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