Site Migration

I wanted to share some information with you all about the migration of this site to a new location.

Even Easier (and automated) Computer Naming

Following on from my post on Friday about naming machines automatically, I wanted to share another bit of PowerShell which is arguably easier to use and easier to implement. If you are not using MDT it is also a great solution.

Easy (and Automated) Computer Naming

Every client I go to has different ideas on the naming of their clients. It’s actually sometimes amazing how complicated people want it to be. If your management infrastructure is setup properly and working, for clients it shouldn’t really matter what your desktops, laptops and tablets are called. Here is a quick way to name your machines using some scripting to make it automated so you can build and forget.

Unable to Install Management Point

I have been working with a colleague to investigate an issue where the management point will not install on a Windows Server 2012 operating system with some pretty strange errors. Read on for more details.

Failed Application Install on Workgroup Clients

I have been working with a customer recently delivering some role specific builds using a combination of ConfigMgr and MDT. The environment I had was already setup and ready to start working on so this has helped in a big way. However, some of the clients are in a workgroup and not the domain here. I had some problems installing applications to these devices.

Hiding Get Online Message During OSD

I have been working with a few customers recently who have experienced a problem when doing OS deployment in ConfigMgr 2012 R2. This issue occurs when deploying Windows 8.1, during the setup the “Get online” screen appears and asks the operator to pick a network. You can skip it or run through the wizard and the task sequence will continue with no errors but this isn’t very useful in zero touch scenarios. How do we remove it?

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.