On October 14, 2025, Windows 10 reached end of life and no longer receives updates. To keep getting updates, you must upgrade to Windows 11 or enroll in the Windows 10 ESU (Extended Security Updates) program. In this post, I will show you step by step how to enable the commercial Windows 10 Extended Security…
slmgr.vbs is the Windows Software Licensing Management Tool, a Microsoft Visual Basic script that comes with Windows and is a core part of the Windows activation system. The full path is C:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs. You can use slmgr.vbs to troubleshoot, activate, change, and uninstall your Windows activation. In this post, I will show you how to use…
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…
