Disable The News and Interests Bar in Windows 10
· ☕ 2 min read
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:

Hyper-V Backup Utility - Update 21.06.02
· ☕ 1 min read
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:

Hyper-V Backup Utility - Update 21.05.30
· ☕ 2 min read
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.

Deploy Windows 10 21H1 Reference Image
· ☕ 14 min read
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.

Build and Capture Windows 10 21H1 Reference Image
· ☕ 10 min read
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.

Disable Network Discovery in Windows 10/11
· ☕ 4 min read
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.

Moving the Site - Update 2021-02-16
· ☕ 1 min read
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.

Start Menu and Taskbar Customisation
· ☕ 3 min read
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.

Prevent Teams From Starting Automatically With No User Login
· ☕ 1 min read
If you are deploying Microsoft Teams but don’t want it to start on login, or force users to login to disable the auto start then you can do it after installation of Teams simply by editing a file. The file is located in the install location of the Teams installer, by default is it here: 1 %programfiles% (x86)\Teams Installer\setup.json The contents of the file should be as follows:

Deploy Windows 10 20H2 Reference Image
· ☕ 14 min read
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.

Build and Capture Windows 10 20H2 Reference Image
· ☕ 10 min read
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.

Log Manager Utility - Update 20.07.27
· ☕ 1 min read
Flexible clean up and backup of log files Just a small update to add the improved error capturing and reporting that I’ve also put in the Hyper-V Backup Utility. 2020-07-30: Version 20.07.27 Added improved error handling and reporting. Log Manager Utility can also be downloaded from: The Microsoft PowerShell Gallery GitHub See the full documentation available here. If you would like to support me, please check out the link below.

Hyper-V Backup Utility - Update 20.07.13
· ☕ 1 min read
Flexible Hyper-V Backup Utility A substantial update in terms of changes made under the hood, but I’ve also added a few new options requested by users. The biggest change is that errors are now handled properly and reported to the user in a reliable manner. All the changes are summarized below. Version 20.07.13 Added -ShortDate option. This will create backups with only the Year, Month, Day as the file name.