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 […]

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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.

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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

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

Sometimes security is on the border of being ridiculous. Modern Windows 10 is very anxious when connecting to guest-access allowed, readonly Samba shares, Here’s how to allow “insecure” guest logons for stand-alone computers. The same is true when configuring a GPO. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4046019/guest-access-smb2-disabled-by-default-in-windows-10-server-2016.

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While trying to log in on our Novell servers using Client for OES 2 SP4 IR7a on Windows 10 1709, I was greeted with: A required network service has not started. Please check your error log for details. The third reply of this post gave me a clue, simply run setup.exe one more time and […]

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Error 0x800F081F while installing .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows 10 might be due to corporate WSUS servers not allowing such updates. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU in the Windows registry and set UseWUServer to 0 (zero). Restart the Windows Update service (net stop wuauserv & net start wuauserv) and retry installing .NET Framework 3.5. Set UseWUServer back […]

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One or more of the recent updates for Windows 10 rendered my laptop incapable of communicating with the outside world. The Windows Firewall failed to run due to Base Filtering Engine not being able to run either. It’s the dreaded “Error 5: Access denied” error message all over again. Windows 10 also thought it was […]

Read More → Windows 10 wedges itself