Support is >Here<

In many Organizations, the AD support team is separated from the team in charge of Imaging.  The AD team naturally is protective with their setup and fight any GPO setting that would result in more responsibility to their staff.  So that leaves us in some occasions having to turn to Local Group Policy to apply the settings we want.  I’ve recently come across some great tools provided by Microsoft (very quietly) for Government usage.  [ Read More ]

Because the Windows 7 CopyProfile=true option only saves a handful of configurations.  We are left with the fun of trying to automate the rest.  I’ve outline some basic, such as specifying a custom Themepack for All Users: http://supportishere.com/how-to-set-theme-in-windows-7-via-script-for-all-users/   The Windows 7 Alert Settings can become a nuisance if you disable the Firewall or do not use a Virus protection program that MS considers safe.  So in some cases, it  [ Read More ]

How To Automate an Installation with AutoIt: When Silent installation switches fail, and re-packaging the installation is not an option, then AutoIt is the best tool for the job. It can easily mimic any manual input performed during installations. I listed some quick tips below, but I strongly urge you to review the help documentation included in AutoIt. On a clean machine, preferably a Virtual Machine (With Snapshot support), install  [ Read More ]

I previously wrote an article on how to set the default theme via a script: http://supportishere.com/how-to-set-theme-in-windows-7-via-script-for-all-users/ This article is displaying a method to simply set the Default Background image for new users in Windows 7. This method performs the following actions: 1. Takes Ownership of “C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper\Windows\img0.jpg”. start /w "TakeOwn Of img0" "C:\Windows\System32\takeown.exe" /A /F "C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper\Windows\img0.jpg" 2. Grant Full Permissions to img0.jpg file to Administrator. start /w "Take Permissions" "C:\Windows\System32\Icacls.exe" "C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper\Windows\img0.jpg"  [ Read More ]

I build all of my Core images in Virtual Machine environments.  There are many benefits of doing this, which I’ll leave for another article.  However, some cons exist; such as the ability to change settings only related to portable computers in the core image prior to capture.  Due to this limitation, I need to set this setting Post-Image.  Unfortunately, Windows XP’s “powercfg.exe” built-in utility does not have this setting available.   [ Read More ]