Microsoft have recently released the System Center Technical Preview Evaluation VHD’s for you to to take a look at and launch using your Hyper-V environment. DOWNLOADS You can download the VHD’s using the links below for the following products: Data Protection Manager Evaluation VHD Operations Manager Evaluation VHD Orchestrator Evaluation VHD Service Manager Evaluation VHD…
This post now forms part of our KMS and evaluation product keys series. We have shared with you all the product keys you should ever require for Microsoft user and server operating systems. You can see the full list available to you by clicking the link below: Microsoft Evaluation and KMS Product Key Series This…
Microsoft have now released the Windows 10 Technical Preview for you to try out on an evaluation licence. You can download the ISO files from the link below but be warned, they are about 4GB in size each: Windows 10 Technical Preview Download The serial number that you should use to active your Windows 10…
Simple to follow guide to help you fix the Windows Update issue when it gets stuck on reboot or shut down of the operating system.
If you are a Configuration Manager administrator, the chances are that you are using the Application Catalog to allow users to install their own software.A great feature of this is that you can put in specialist or licensed software and add a “Request” button. This means that your end users will only get the software…
If you want to report on machines that have Outlook archive (PST’s) on them, where they are and how big they are, then you can use this guide to create a report that will do this for you using Configuration Manager. First of all, you will need to tell your Software Inventory to look for…
We have had a report that one of our WQL queries has not been working correctly, this is the one for devices that have Configuration Manager client installed but do not have System Center Endpoint Protection installed on them. The original post is here: WQL Query for Devices without Endpoint Installed So, we have looked…
You may have started to come across image files that are in WEBP forma on the internet recently. These are usually opened using Google Chrome but this can be very annoying if you have saved a number of these images and want to browse through them using Windows Photo Viewer instead of having to open…
We have recently been doing some big OSD projects and with testing for such big projects comes the point where some of your testing will fail, so to find out why a test sequence fails, the first thing you should look at is your log files. However, ConfigMgr makes this an annoying process as the…
We have recently had problems with our global distribution points in ConfigMgr after the monthly content validation has happened. On some of our distribution points (not all) we are getting and error stating: “Failed to validate content hash” With our monitoring on the Distribution Point Configuration Status looking like this (click the thumbnails for the…
If you have been trying to load any roles or features onto your Server 2012 R2 Core using Powershell, then you may find that you are the victim of this error message everytime you try to run your command: No matter was source you enter, it will not work. This frustrated us for days until…
Powershell is becoming more and more important these days and the possibilities for using it are endless. However, there are also a large amount of very basic easy-to-use commands that you should add to your knowledge collection. We all pick up new Powershell commands that help us to do our jobs all the time so…
If you are using Server 2012 R2 Core and you wish to join it to the domain, then you can use this simple Powershell command to do it. Add-Computer -DomainName YOURDOMAIN.COM -Credentials DOMAINUSERNAME -Restart Note that the -Restart command at the end will automatically restart your server once it has completed the joining process. Also…
If you are using Windows 2012 R2 Core or if you just like using Powershell, then you may want to know how to enable Remote Desktop. To do this, you should go into your Core server where you should see a command box. In here, type in Powershell and press enter. This will open up…
On April 8th 2014, Microsoft ended all support for Windows XP. They then released a number of Windows Updates that displays annoying messages on your desktop telling you that your operating system is now at its end of life. This is the Windows message: The second is the Microsoft Security Essentials one: We have been…
We have had a number of people asking us how they can remove the annoying end of life message that Windows XP displays. There are actually two of them, one is a Windows end of life message that looks like this: The other is Microsoft Security Essentials end of life message that looks like this:…
Microsoft have released a number of documents to make up a best practice guide for System Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2. The documents are free to download and although we have not read through them ourselves yet, we are told that they are very good so worth a read. You can download the documents individually…
If you want to report on the servers that have not had a reboot in the last week within your Configuration Manager environment then you can run this query directly on your SQL database or you can use it to create a report within SSRS. How to create a Configuration Manager Report using SSRS SQL…
If you want to report on the machines that do not have the ConfigMgr client installed within your Configuration Manager environment then you can run this query directly on your SQL database or you can use it to create a report within SSRS. How to create a Configuration Manager Report using SSRS The query is…
Sorry about the recent lack of updates on our site but we have been incredibly busy fixing “real world” IT issues! Its also the silly season for holidays so over the next month updates may be a little sparse but we will try our best! We recently came across a really good blog post by Daniel…
We have recently had a number of reports of bluetooth devices like mice and keyboards randomly disconnecting since people have upgraded to Windows 8.1 Update 1. This can be extremely frustrating when you are flying along typing an email and you have nothing to show on your screen for your efforts! Most of the time,…
We had reports from a customer this week about strange issues with their Configuration Manager OSD Task Sequences failing. The OSD seemed to work on most machines but a new batch of refurbished laptops would PXE boot but then would fail after the task sequence had been selected with a generic Microsoft error (you know…
We have recently had to rebuild a number of machines and the main issue that our users bring up is the fact that our first line techs keep forgetting to put users Outlook email signatures back. This, infuriates end users nearly as much as not putting back their 500 desktop shortcuts. Now, we – as…
You may have noticed that if you get an error when deploying an image using OSD in Configuration Manager the machine will display that error for 15 minutes and then reboot the machine. If you are running an image at lunch break or even overnight, this is obviously not even time to get the log…
