2013 Blog Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for the blog. Thanks for your support this year and I look forward to blogging in 2014.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 34,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Windows 8.1 Deployment Getting Ready Issues

I have been working on deploying Windows 8.1 zero touch this week. It has gone really well except for a couple of little challenges. One of these was a number of devices appearing to get stuck at the “Getting Ready” screen of Windows setup. The devices in question would sit at this screen for a long time, usually more than two hours.

Disabling the First Logon Animation in Windows 8

Deploying Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 is pretty simple, gone of the days when we needed mass storage drivers all the time and we needed a copy of sysprep to capture our image. It’s not much simpler but we still want to do customisations to our images. In this post I will show you how to disable the first logon animation.

Visual C++ Redistributables Made Simple

Of all the software I have had to deploy at a customers site, the most common is probably the Visual C++ Redistributables. They are not difficult to setup but can create headaches due to the number of them. In this post I will share some information to make the deployment of them much simpler.

Disabling Browser Choice During OSD

For some time now, customer in the EU have been presented with the Browser Choice application which is a KB update designed to settle a legal dispute with the EU Commission. In the enterprise this is often not required and can be disabled because we have a corporate standard which dictates which browser our employees use by default.

Distribution Point Sizer Tool

Here is the first release of a new utility I have wrote which will assist with the sizing of distribution points.

Cleaning up Broken Clients

It’s been a while since a post, I have been really busy recently with the Cloud OS Community events and some Inframon events recently, as well as the usual work with customers. As we get to the end of life in terms of ConfigMgr 2007, one thing that is coming more common is the requirement to migrate from ConfigMgr 2007 to ConfigMgr 2012. I have noticed lots of problems customers have experienced when trying to install site system roles on servers which used to have a ConfigMgr 2007 client installed. Here is my cleanup process.