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.

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?

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.

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.

Why You Should Care About Boot Performance

This blog post is slightly off topic, it’s more related to the performance of operating systems in the enterprise and why you should care about the boot performance of your machines. This posts comes from some work I have been doing with a customer recently analyzing their new image during a Windows 7 migration. This post details some of my findings.

Task Sequences in ConfigMgr 2012 R2

One of the improvements in ConfigMgr 2012 R2 is the introduction of some MDT task sequence steps that are natively in ConfigMgr. In this post I want to take a look at some of these changes.

Should We Use Unknown Computer Support?

I have had a few interesting discussions around enabling unknown computer support for operating system deployment. It is one of these subjects that is very subjective, everyone has their own ideas, I thought I would share mine and my experiences.