Script on Anything About IT

Windows 8 – Script for customizing WinPE 4.0 – Part 2 - Customizing the Wallpaper

Mon, 28 May 2012 22:09:35 +0000

As a follow up on my earlier post Windows 8 – Script for customizing WinPE 4.0 – Part 1 I want to share with you how to customize the WinPE wallpaper. Credits go to blog reader “Max” who responded on a question from reader Carl H.

In WinPE 4.0 the wallpaper is not called winpe.bmp as in previous versions of WinPE but winpe.jpg. Also the winpe.jpg has special permissions so overwriting the file would require changing them. An easier approach is to add your custom WinPE wallpaper file to the WinPE sources and change the appropriate registry value in WinPE.

Windows 8 – Script for customizing WinPE 4.0 – Part 1

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:48:55 +0000

Today I want to share with you a small script I’ve put together for customizing WinPE 4.0 that will ship with Windows 8. I’ve rewritten the script based on some existing script code we already use today, but wanted by purpose a small independent script that I can hook in between the standard scripts provided within the ADK sources, mainly for familiarizing myself with anything new within WinPE 4.0.

When you install the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) on a 64 bit system, you will find the WinPE 4.0 sources stored under C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Windows Preinstallation Environment.

Retrieve Windows Boot Time Script

Thu, 19 May 2011 00:42:14 +0000

Here’s a small batch script to get the Windows 7 Boot time shown in milliseconds.

@echo off
FOR /F “Tokens=4” %%a IN (’%windir%\system32\wevtutil.exe qe Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational /rd:true /f:Text /c:1 /q:"*[System[(EventID = 100)]]" /e:Events ^| FIND “Duration”’) DO SET BTIME=%%a
ECHO Boot Time is : %BTIME%

Inspiration for this script came from the article Monitor System Startup Performance in Windows 7 written by Sean Wheeler for WindowsITPro.

Windows XP Mode Deployment Sample Scripts

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:56:37 +0000

if you have watched the Windows XP Mode IT Pro Deployment Video, you might be interested in the scripts they’ve used to automatically install XP Mode and create virtual machines. You can download them from here

A site worth mentioning

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:17:19 +0000

While searching for something I came across the site computer performance, why the sites is called like that, i don’t know, but it has a lot of interesting content related to windows 2008, vista, scripting etc. so that i find it worth mentioning.

Using BITS for file downloads

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:12:01 +0000

Today I have come across the topic BITS which stands for Binary Intelligent Transfer Service which is a file transfer technology that is included in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista.

What is nice about BITS is that it provides Checkpoint recovery and network throttling. This means that when a download is being interrupted because the remote site became temporarily unavailable or you had shut down your client, BITS will automatically resume the download when the remote source becomes available again or when the machine has been powered up again.

Disable System Restore through WMI

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:16:05 +0000

If you are sure about what you are doing and you want to speed up the installation of multiple security patches or applications, you can use the following WMI command to disable Windows XP system restore.

on error resume next
set sr=GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\default:SystemRestore")
e=sr.disable("")

To turn on System Restore again, use the following command:

on error resume next
set sr=GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\default:SystemRestore")
e=sr.enable("")

Scripting XP quicklaunchbar

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 08:20:27 +0000

I posted this a couple of years ago into the MyITforum site and received plenty of replies on this, as at that stage it was an unknown trick. Below the trick how to enable the Windows XP quicklaunch bar by using a registry hack.

copy the reg key “HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop\Default Taskbar” to: “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop\Taskbar” (for XP RTM) “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop\TaskbarWinXP” (for XP SP1) (to be safe copy it to both locations)