thinking IT loud
This is a quick post to explain how you can get search working from the emoji keyboard in Windows 10 or Windows 11. This should work by default but some organisations block the downloading of the optional features that would allow it.
Update 07/01/2022: I found the magic command line to fix it all! Jump to the bottom to see.
How do you provide someone a secure well managed Desktop PC and apps without having to provide an expensive laptop or desktop tower that has a limited lifespan? Virtual Desktops are a common solution to this conundrum. A Virtual Desktop allows a person to use whatever device they want (like a home PC, smartphone, iPad etc) to access a remote desktop server running on centralised hardware in an organisation’s server room or datacentre. That is what is meant by a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution. Although these solutions have been around for decades from companies like Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, they have required a lot of high-end hardware and specialist expertise to make them work well. Due to that requirement, they often have not been able to meet the promise of being a more cost-effective solution than just giving everyone a laptop.
With the COVID-19 pandemic we have seen an acceleration of the shift to remote and hybrid working that was already well on its way beforehand. Other scenarios like organisations expanding through mergers, or starting partnerships with other companies, or having temporary/seasonal staff, can add further challenges to onboarding and provisioning IT services, business continuity, and security and compliance.
VDI is a great solution to those challenges but many organisations don’t have the capacity to deal with that demand. Cloud service providers like Microsoft and Amazon have helped to address that issue with Amazon Workspaces and Azure Virtual Desktop (previously known as Windows Virtual Desktop). By using these Cloud options you no longer have to worry about pre-purchasing a large amount of hardware and calculating complex capacity requirements – you can set up the networking, Virtual Desktops, applications etc all in the Cloud and scale it up and down as demand changes. However, you still need that specialist expertise to get it right in the first place.
Microsoft wanted to make providing Virtual Desktops just as easy as providing someone an email mailbox. Microsoft 365 makes it super simple to configure email services through Exchange Online, meaning organisations no longer need a team of Exchange Server administrators to run its own unique instance, could the same be done for VDI?
Continue reading “Cloud PCs from Windows 365”
Windows 11 has been available for people to test for a few weeks now through the Windows Insider Program on the Dev channel. With the announcement of the new Beta channel I thought it was high time I got my hands on it and started to poke around.
If you’re not familiar with Windows Insider, this is how Microsoft allows early access to preview builds of Windows so that hobbyists and businesses can prepare for changes and provide feedback. There are 3 “channels” that decide how frequently you get a new version of the OS, with the Dev and Beta channel both now providing Windows 11. Joining the programme is a straightforward process if you use a consumer Microsoft Account or a work account (via Azure AD) – all the details on how are on Microsoft Docs. I always recommend businesses have at least some devices registered on the Insider channel so that they can assess what’s coming up before you move on to more formal business pilots. New PCs will start to come with Windows 11 at the end of the year (in time for Christmas), with the in place Windows 10 upgrades beginning to roll out late in 2021 and continue into 2022. So with the upgrade imminent, businesses should start to expect some of their employees are likely to start using the new OS before the organisation rolls it out – this is all the more reason to have teams within IT looking at Windows 11 and preparing for it – just as they would for any of the Windows 10 semi-annual release updates that we have all gotten used to.
Continue reading “First look at Windows 11 beta and why businesses should take a look”
“Customizing screensavers?” I hear you cry, “That’s a bit retro isn’t it?”
Nowadays screensavers have more or less disappeared. It makes much more sense to just turn off the screen after 10 minutes of inactivity. However, there are some instances where a screensaver can be useful, for example, an always-on kiosk or even digital signage.
One of the more useful standard screensavers in the Windows operating system is called “3D Text”. Useful because by default it will display the time but can be customized to display some text instead
Continue reading “Customizing the Text ScreenSaver with Group Policy”
Internet Explorer 10 was released for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 machines back in February 2013. Nine months later and we are going through it again with Internet Explorer 11. For SysAdmins and IT Pros managing software updates, these new versions led to quite a significant change in how we use Group Policy to manage them.
I only recently discovered that when Windows 8 (and along with it IE10) was released they finally got rid of the “Internet Explorer Maintenance” Section of the Group Policy Editor. This section always struck me as an odd place to configure IE settings and I’m still not sure why they couldn’t just use the normal Administrative Template section.
Continue reading “The new way to configure Internet Explorer proxy settings with Group Policy”
Just a quick post because I wanted to give a worthy bit of software a shout-out.
Double Driver from http://www.boozet.org/dd.htm
This little free program lets you back up all of the drivers on your PC for safe keeping. This is really handy if you want to save them all before a major update or re-installation. I also use it a lot on PCs with older operating systems (like Windows XP) because sometimes they are a real pain to try and find from the official OEM website (HP, I’m looking at you). It’s the kind of utility you wished Microsoft had just built directly into the Windows Device Manager.
Continue reading “My Toolbox – Quick and easy driver backup with Double Driver”
You may be wondering why you would bother upgrading your existing Windows XP and Vista machines to Windows 7, when Windows 8 has just been released.
Whether you are a home user or a large company there are great benefits to be had from upgrading and using your new Windows 7 PC as a stepping stone to Microsoft’s latest and greatest.
Windows XP recently celebrated its 10th birthday, a major achievement for it to keep such a stronghold but also a major issue when it becomes time to change to something new. The are always scare stories when Microsoft releases a new OS. The fact of the matter is, change often creates such fear-mongering when really its an opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of.
Businesses stayed away from Windows 7 for 2 major reasons
Nowadays, this isn’t as much of an issue. Windows 7 runs easily on hardware over 4 years old and really flies on the latest kit. All major applications have been updated or can be delivered via modern methods like application virtualisation or by using tools like Microsoft’s free application compatibility toolkit or XP Mode. OS deployment technologies have moved on too, meaning you can upgrade people from XP to 7 in a couple of hours.
Windows Update (a.k.a. Microsoft Update) is normally pretty reliable in terms of keeping your computer up to date and secure. Unfortunately, there are times when an update crashes your PC (usually due to a conflicting OEM driver) or the update process just stops working. Since Windows Vista, Microsoft moved away from using the update.microsoft.com website and now has a dedicated app in the Control Panel. However, the underlying technologies are still the same. Even if you have the Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) server, controlling 100s or 1000s of computers in a corporate network, you are still going to come across the same kind of problems. You would hope that WSUS had some easy troubleshooting/rollback tools built in but unfortunately that is not the case.
I thought it would be a good idea to gather all the various methods and tools I use when troubleshooting Windows/Microsoft Update to help both Home and Enterprise users alike
Continue reading “How to Troubleshoot Windows Update Errors”
Each Service that runs in Windows features a Recovery tab in the Services.msc management console. Normally I only ever set this up to restart the service after 5 minutes in case something had conflicted with it’s initial start-up attempt. However, we recently had a problem with an IBM service that caused our Windows 2003 R2 x64 server to reboot if it crashed. I thought it would be very handy if we could get an email sent to the IT department if the service was failing. I had dabbled with using BLAT in the past but seeing as all of our servers already have PowerShell installed I thought that would be a more efficient option.
Continue reading “Using PowerShell to send a Windows Service Recovery Email Alert”
I recently had an issue with the latest version of Firefox (v3.6.15). Normally, when we install Firefox on our network, we have to change the proxy settings from the default “No Proxy” to “Auto-detect proxy settings for this network”. This doesn’t normally cause much of an issue as we only use Firefox on a few select machines and can be changed by the individual user. However, it seems the default install behaviour has slightly changed to add a new option that seems to muddy the water. There is now a “Use system proxy settings” option (similar to Google’s Chrome) that seems to be selected by default for new users. Although this may seem to make sense, on our network this causes terribly slow page load times, e.g. 10 minutes to load google.co.uk. Luckily I found a way to set the “Auto-detect” option for all users.
WARNING: This seems to have changed again since Firefox 4 was released. If anyone knows how to change it please add a comment.
Continue reading “Configuring Firefox proxy settings for all users”
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