Yesterday I’ve talked about the Windows 8 Refresh Your PC feature, today I’d like to show how you can reset Windows 8 without using external media. When performing a Reset on a Windows 8 client, you are going to run a complete fresh installation of Windows 8 without preserving any user data or settings. You [...]
Archive of posts tagged installation
Automated Microsoft Security Essentials Installation
For all those that frequently setup test machines and get tired of manually installing the Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0, here’s a straight forward batch file (even a regular user could use) that does the following: Downloads the Microsoft Security Essential 2.0 (x86) installation source file Installs Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Downloads and updates the virus [...]
Inside the Windows 7 Driver Store
The driver store is a trusted location of inbox and third-party driver packages. This means that before a driver can be installed it must first be injected into the driver store, this process is called staging. Today I want to take a closer look at what is inside the driver store specifically the drivers that [...]
Prevent the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool from formatting the USB flash drive
If you want to install Windows 7 from USB you can use Microsoft’s Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool which you can download from here. By default the tool requires that the USB disk is being erased before copying the Windows 7 installation media, hence you get the following messages. This is a bit laborious, [...]
ReadTip: For IT professionals: Deployment guide for Microsoft Office 2010
Microsoft recently published a deployment guide for Microsoft Office 2010. The content in this book is a copy of selected content from the Office 2010 Resource Kit Technical library. Download the guide from here
Getting access to Windows 7 Evaluation installation sources
Most IT pro’s probably don’t have a problem in getting access to the Windows 7 operating system installation sources because they can access them through their corporate volume license agreement and/or MSDN or TechNet subscription. But unfortunately there are still some out there who do not have such easy access to these sources. For the [...]
ToolTip: Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool
The Windows 7 USB / DVD Download Tool allows you to transfer the content of the Windows 7 installation sources to a USB device or DVD media. The tool is FREE and can be downloaded from here If you use Windows XP you must have at least the .NET Framework 2.0 or higher installed and [...]
Installing Branded IE7 on Windows XP Service Pack 3
I’ve spend nearly 3 hours in troubleshooting today to find out the reason why a custom IE7 package, that worked fine on Windows XP SP2 would not work on Windows XP SP3. If you are using a custom Internet Explorer 7 package (created with the Internet Explorer Administration Toolkit) and plan to rebuild your enterprise [...]
Leftover files after .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 installation
Some of you might have noticed that after installing the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1, there can be a leftover folder in the root of the system as shown in the picture below. We identified this issue right after .NET 3.5 SP1 was installed, and found out soon that we were not the only [...]
Reduce software installation time
Windows7 comes with Windows Installer 5.0 that has a new installation property called MSIFASTINSTALL. Using the MSIFASTINSTALL property can help reduce time required to install a windows installer package. The trick behind MSIFASTINSTALL is quite simple, it just skips things that consume time like creating a system restore point or calculating the space requirements (File [...]
