With Microsoft Windows installations, there’s a hidden user profile called Default. Anything in that user profile is copied directly to any new user account that logs into the computer. It is a template for each user who logs onto that system. The default user profile is located C:\Users\Default When a user logs into a Windows…
Certain situations can arise where you no longer know a Windows user account password and need to reset it or make a new one. Third-party tools can assist, but in my experience, many of them have been hit-and-miss. In this post, I will show you step-by-step how to reset a Windows password using Windows install…
The Company Portal application is a wonderful tool for Microsoft Intune. If you come from the world of ConfigMgr (Microsoft Configuration Manager aka SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager)), it is the Intune version of Software Center. Company Portal allows users to install programs you publish on the Company Portal. My favorite part is that the…
Usually, when you want to control the Windows Update settings, you create a GPO to manage the settings or tweak some registry entries. Both methods alter the registry values in the registry key To reset any custom Windows Update settings, I nuke out that registry key or reverse the GPO or both, and restart the…
Windows Autopilot uses several mechanisms to function. A common one is the device’s hardware hash, also called the hardware ID. There are several ways to gather the hardware ID from a device to use in Windows Autopilot. In this post, I will show step-by-step how to get the hardware ID from a system with PowerShell…
I recently discovered that I caused an unintended side effect on Windows 10 when deploying a default taskbar for all users. In my post Intune Deploy Default Taskbar I inadvertently introduced a bug to the Windows 10 Start Menu making it so users can’t customize anything. The bug is that users can pin programs to…
As the end of Windows 10 starts creeping up we have to adapt some of our methods to support mixed environments with Windows 10 and Windows 11. Most settings in Microsoft Intune aren’t specific to Windows 10 or Windows 11 some settings are specific to the version. For example, one of them is the Windows…
A while back I saw someone’s computer that had a company logo in the Windows taskbar; it looked super slick. I wanted to duplicate the same thing in my setup. The documentation on what causes a company logo to show up in the search box in the Windows taskbar and the Windows start menu is…
Have you ever wanted to be sneaky and hide a program that’s installed on your computer from Programs and Features and the Apps & features list? Well search no more, I have all the answers you seek. It’s shockingly simple. Proper programs will list their uninstall info directly in the registry all we have to…
Recently I came across an issue were multiple HP systems that had a fresh install of Windows 10 Pro 1703 from a known working ISO and then upgraded to 1709. Once on 1709 the audio drivers wouldn’t work at all and if you tried to install the correct driver from HP it still wouldn’t fix…
