This post is a cut down version of this one and only focusses on Windows 11 for clarity. Important note! A “provisioned app” is an app that is a part of the Windows 11 installation and will be available for all users. Otherwise the app is only installed for the currently logged on user. To remove apps for all future users and the currently logged on user, you must remove both types of app.

Flexible Hyper-V Backup Utility I’ve (finally) added the option to specify the port for the SMTP server. If not configured it will use the default of port 25. 2021-08-10: Version 21.08.10 Added an option to specify the Port for SMTP communication. Hyper-V Backup Utility can be downloaded from: The Microsoft PowerShell Gallery GitHub See the full documentation available here. Support My Work If you would like to support me, please check out the links below.

Flexible Hyper-V Backup Utility Since implementing support for 7-Zip it has added a whole load of additional possibilities to test for. This has created some difficulties for me, however I have been hard at work and have believe I’ve tackled the problem by introducing a formal testing process (and mostly automated it) in order to test some popular possible configs. You should be able to use any option that 7-zip supports, although currently the only options I’ve tested fully are ‘-t’ archive type, ‘-p’ password and ‘-v’ split files.

Automate Creation of WIM Files Just a small update to this utility. Some tidying up of code and added a progression bar so you can see at a glance how far through the list of TS ID’s the script is. 2021-06-22: Version 21.06.22 Added a progression bar display. Changed a variable to prevent conflicts with future PowerShell versions. Image Factory Utility can be downloaded from: The Microsoft PowerShell Gallery GitHub See the full documentation available here.

Flexible Hyper-V Backup Utility Just a small update to add the ability to use any 7-zip command line option with the utility. 2021-06-14: Version 21.06.14 Replaced -Sz* specific options with -SzOptions which will support any option that 7-zip supports. Hyper-V Backup Utility can be downloaded from: The Microsoft PowerShell Gallery GitHub See the full documentation available here. Support My Work If you would like to support me, please check out the links below.

The New News and Interests Bar for Windows 10 In the June updates for Windows 10 the News and interests bar has been rolled out to Windows 10 and is enabled by default. If you want to disable it as a user, it’s easily done by right-clicking on the Taskbar > News and Interests > Turn off. Job done. 👍 Registry The registry entry for the setting is per-user and is located here:

Flexible Hyper-V Backup Utility A bug fix update. When using archive types other than zip, the backup files were not being moved from the working directory to the final backup location. Thanks to @gabfot1 on Twitter for the bug report. 2021-06-02: Version 21.06.02 Fixed an error where file types which are not .zip were not being moved from the working directory to the final backup location. Hyper-V Backup Utility can be downloaded from:

Flexible Hyper-V Backup Utility Another substantial update. I’ve added the ability to support 7-Zip’s split file function and due to wanting to support for 7-Zip’s other file formats I’ve had to make the difficult decision to alter how the configuration switches are handled. This means that this updated script may not be a simple drop in replacement if you are using a previous version with 7-Zip features. The biggest change is that when using 7-Zip features you will need to add an additional hyphen ‘-’ to the configuration.

News and Updates An update for Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT_KB4564442) has been released: This update fixes a boot loop issue. Details on how to install it are on Michael Niehaus' blog post here and you can download the fix here. Installation instructions will also be in the walkthrough below. NOTE: If you have existing shares you will need to copy the files from the extracted update to %DeployRoot%\Tools and overwrite the existing files in all shares.

News and Updates An update for Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT_KB4564442) has been released: This update fixes a boot loop issue. Details on how to install it are on Michael Niehaus' blog post here and you can download the fix here. Installation instructions will also be in the walkthrough below. NOTE: If you have existing shares you will need to copy the files from the extracted update to %DeployRoot%\Tools and overwrite the existing files in all shares.

Fully disabling Network Discovery in Windows 10 using Group Policy To properly disable Network Discovery in Windows 10 in a way that the user cannot easily re-enable we must create some firewall rules and prevent some services from running on start-up. We can do both things using Group Policy. Firewall Rules Create a new Group Policy or use an existing one that takes effect on computer objects. Go to Computer Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Windows Firewall with Advanced Security.

Update 2021-02-16 Theme changed to add site search. New theme is also more configurable, which I’m happy about. :) Will continue to tweak the site and layout of certain pages that have got garbled in the migration. Update 2021-02-14 Links to old popular articles now have aliases so old links will work. Still working on site-wide search, I may just change the Hugo theme. I’m currently moving the site from WordPress to Hugo with comments provided by Disqus.

For Windows 11 please check out this post It’s been a long while since I last posted about how to customise the Windows 10 Start Menu and Taskbar for new users when deploying images, so it’s time to fix that! The first thing we need to do is setup what we want our Start Menu to look like and export it. Log on to a Windows 10 machine that has all of the software you want to be pinned on the Start Menu layout and customise the Start Menu as you want it.