Practical IT Guides for Windows, SCCM & PowerShell Admins
TechyGeeksHome has been helping IT professionals and sysadmins since 2010. Find 1,500+ real-world guides covering Windows 10 & 11, Windows Server, SCCM/ConfigMgr, PowerShell scripting, Active Directory, networking, and virtualisation — all written from hands-on production experience by a UK IT pro with 26 years in the field.
If you are using custom updates for things Java or Adobe updates via WSUS and SCUP, then you need to ensure that you enable signed intranet updates for all your client machines. The best way to do this is to use Group Policy. You should create a new Group Policy Object (GPO) and apply that … Read more
Bit of a simple one this but very useful…. If you want to add a link into the left sidebar of your windows explorer (which is the bit below): All you have to do is browse to %userprofile%Links and then right-click, then go to New then Create Shortcut. Then follow the wizard to create a … Read more
Like most businesses, we still have programs that rely on Windows XP to run. So, I built a Windows XP Professional image to push out to our slightly older machines where XP is needed to run these older programs. Once created, the image on some machines was working fine, but on some (mostly newer older … Read more
If you are as stupid as me and manage to make a partition active that you shouldn’t have done, so long as you haven’t restarted the machine, there is a quick easy fix to put it right. On the machine, do the following: Go into a Command Prompt Type “diskpart” Type “list volume” Type “select … Read more
As you may have seen on some of my previous posts, you can update Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Reader X via Windows Updates using SCUP through WSUS/SCCM. This stops the annoying pop-ups for users especially when they can’t install updates if they have not got local admin rights – just like standard Windows Updates, this … Read more
You can install drivers by computer model using a WMI script during the SCCM OSD task sequence. This means that when you deploy an image, the target machine will always get the full and correct drivers for the model, rather than getting mismatched drivers. This also speeds up the deployment process. To do this is very … Read more
UPDATE : Get WMI Query v1.6 Now Released You can use WMI for various things but one of its uses is for identifying the model name of a machine so that it can be later used for Configuration Manager OSD or maybe even for Group Policy WMI security. To find out the model name of a … Read more
A recurring issue that I have is the old Active Desktop in Windows XP. No matter how many times you click the Restore button, you still get the script error. To fix this, you can do the following: Click Start then click Run, type “regedit” and press enter Browse to “HCUSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerDesktopSafeModeComponents” Double click the value DeskHtmlVersion … Read more
We have been looking into getting our OSD process to automatically change the computer name to what we want it to be for a while now but never really had much luck with it. Reading various forums and blogs, many people have said to use WSNAME and many others saying use scripts, all of which … Read more
If you get an issue when trying to load a task sequence and you get the message that a package associated to the task sequence cannot be found, even when it looks like all packages are fully distributed, then you need to check out the SMSTSLog.log file that is on the machine that you are … Read more
I’ve had a number of requests about how I created our email notification for requests for software made via our ConfigMgr software catalog. The solution is very simple and very basic, but until I get our Service Manager up and running (which does the job much better..), this is working for us so hopefully will … Read more
We came across an issue today where the capture media (ISO) that we use to capture our newly created images would not load when running the TSMBAUTORUN.exe file from an explorer box. This was even more strange as it works fine for x86 versions of Windows. After some digging around, its to do with the … Read more