Author: hewagen

  • Programmatically delete a user’s profile

    Deleting old and orphaned user profiles on a PC can easily be done using the Advanced System Properties dialog. But is there a way to delete local Profiles remotely? In short: Yes, there is. And even better, you can do this all from command line or from Powershell. The WMI class Win32_UserProfile offers a not…

  • Fix orphaned Start Menu items

    Hey community, this is Helmut Wagensonner, a Customer Engineer for Windows Client platform. Today I want to provide you a workaround for an issue I ran into a couple of times now at my customers. Please note that at the date of writing the product group and engineers are investigating the root cause and probably…

  • Stay awake!

    From time to time it appears that I need to keep my PC running and prevent it from going to sleep. There are a couple of places where screen timeouts and standby/sleep options can be configured: Engery options, screen saver, system idle timeout, just to name the most common ones. To get rid of it…

  • UE-V Template Generator Error

    Related to: ADK 1703, 1709, 1803, 1809 After installing the UE-V Template generator it throws an error when you try to create a custom template. In the following example I’m trying to create a template for 7ZIP. Clicking Next triggers the UAC. After confirming the UAC window with Yes, following error appears. Additionally, the SCM…

  • Disassemble Powershell CMDlets

    Hey community, I am Helmut Wagensonner, a Customer Engineer at Microsoft and with today’s blog I show you, how to look behind the implementation of Powershell CMDLets. Ever wondered how the Microsoft guys code their powershell Commands? Ever wanted to take a peek at the implementation of a Powershell command? “You take the red pill…

  • Making file type associations enterprise ready

    You may have noticed already that file type association has changed fundamentally in Windows 10. It is no longer possible for Administrators to set the default application for a certain file type dynamically. The only remaining option is, to create an XML file containing the desired FTA’s and import it using DISM (only valid for…

  • PCRDump

    When running into Bitlocker recovery issues I always used the tools PCPTool (written by Stefan Thom) and Win7PCRv2 (actually I couldn’t figure out who coded this one) to dump the TPM PCR registers. On some devices with newer Win 10 builds (1709 onwards) the tools were throwing errors. PCPTool complained about a too small buffer…