Based on all the ruckus caused by KB5012170, if you are able, determine if BitLocker is active, and if so and if undesired, disable it on all drives before rebooting your computer running Microsoft Windows 10/11. It looks like my computer is in the clear. If it hadn’t been, then I would run these two […]

Read More → Disable BitLocker

sources\install.wim in recent releases of Windows 10 has exceeded FAT32’s maximum filesize of 4 GiB. If you only boot UEFI systems and you want to use memory sticks for better performance while installing, you must split sources\install.wim into smaller files. Luckily, the dism command can do this for you.

Read More → Split install.wim into install.swm and install2.swm

Last month I created two Windows 10 1909 images for a Dell Precision 5540, one image for “naked” Windows 10 including all drivers, and another image complete with all our usual software. That laptop came with BIOS version 1.3.3, which was upgraded to 1.4.0 before any of the images were captured.

Read More → Dell Precision 5540, Windows 10 1909, and endless automatic repair cycle

I installed Citrix XenServer 7.2 on a spare server, created a small VM running FreeBSD/amd64 head r347896, and updated the host all the way to XS 7.6. Upgrading to Citrix Hypervisor 8.0.0 requires boot media, and the procedure is pretty painless. I added the XS80E001.zip update and rebooted the host. Neither a license server nor a license […]

Read More → Citrix Hypervisor 8.0.0 and FreeBSD guests running with UEFI boot firmware

For some unknown reason, KB4474419 and KB4489878 failed to install automatically on Windows 7 SP1 x64 and Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, respectively. One client was unable to install KB4474419 and two servers had issues with KB4489878. After struggling for a while, I opted to download the updates and installing them manually. Go to https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/ […]

Read More → KB4474419 and KB4489878

Having access to “Azure Dev Tools for Teaching” (formerly known as MS Imagine, MS DreamSpark, and MSDN Academic Alliance) for training and experimentation has its perks, but I miss the ability to show certain desktop icons without activating Windows 10 and/or Server 2019. Here’s how.

Read More → Desktop icons in modern Windows