Dell recently released the Dell Command | Configure utility (previously known as the Dell Client Configuration Toolkit – CCTK) that allows IT Pros to configure and manage Dell Enterprise client systems. The latest release (version 3.1 at the time of this blog) includes support for Windows 10 and WinPE 10. The Command | Configure utility…
If you have ever had the need to test the PXE booting capabilities using System Center 2012 Configuration Manager using a Required Deployment, but did not want the OS Deployment part, then this blog is for you. With Available Deployments, the user has to press an additional key to get the system to PXE boot. …
Windows Image sizes continue to get bigger and bigger. I recently recreated my WIMs that I use for testing and applied all important updates through March of 2015 before taking the capture (using MDT of course). For Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit), I started with the latest available Windows 7 Enterprise with SP1 ISOs. …
In System Center Configuration Manager Operating System Deployment, content can be obtained in one of two ways for network deployments. The first way is to configure the Task Sequence Deployment to “Download all content locally before starting task sequence”. There are a few downsides to this option – it is only available to ConfigMgr clients…
Last week Microsoft released Remote Desktop Connection Manager version 2.7 (aka RDCMan). It has some really cool features and supports Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. This tool is essential if you run a lot of virtual machines. One of the new features allows the ability to connect directly to virtual machines (called virtual machine connect-to-console support). …
I am really honored to have been a speaker at the first ever Midwest Management Summit (aka the new MMS), that took place November 10th – 12th in Minnesota. This event was the who’s who of systems management and did not disappoint. There were over 100 sessions delivered in three days by 50+ experts (which included 32 Microsoft…
Recently, I was curious to see if I could get 1E PXE Everywhere (included with 1E Nomad) to boot a MDT Lite Touch boot image. Since PXE Everywhere integrates with System Center Configuration Manager, it automatically creates the necessary BCD files based on the ConfigMgr boot images. So that left me with using the command line…
If you have worked with ConfigMgr much, you know that uses WMI to stores tons of information. WMI uses the CIM_DATETIME format, which looks like this: yyyymmddHHMMSS.mmmmmmsUUU. In order to work with this in PowerShell, you need to convert it into something that the Get-Date cmdlet can understand. Here are two ways that you can accomplish this: Using…
Last month I had the honor of speaking at my first ever IT/Dev Connections in sunny Las Vegas. I had the pleasure of presenting on Building the Ultimate Operating System Task Sequence with my coworker and good friend Troy Martin. As promised, we have completed publishing a series of blogs on all the topics in…
If you spend a lot of time creating ConfigMgr 2012 R2 OSD Task Sequences, you probably have a method for inserting the steps and groups that you like to use in every TS you create. Maybe you open a reference TS up and copy and paste steps into a new TS that you are creating. …
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