There is a great new post over here (http://adventuresinosd.blogspot.com/2011/04/top-10-reasons-to-avoid-windows-7-32.html) at Adventures in OSD on the reasons to avoid the 32-bit version of Windows 7 in the enterprise. I strongly agree with all of his points and made one conclusion – if you are going to run a 32-bit OS then stick with Windows XP 32-bit, [...]

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Several Dell laptop models including the E6400, D630, D520 and D430 all require the Sigmatel audio drivers on Windows XP. While the ‘auto apply drivers’ and ‘apply driver packages’ features of SCCM OSD work well for all other device drivers, the Sigmatel audio drivers have been a constant pain. I have finally resolved this by [...]

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While using SCCM 2007 R2 to deploy a Windows XP SP3 sysprepped image, I was constantly getting an issue when the imaged machine starts up for the first time and runs the sysprep mini-setup – “Setup was unable to change the password for user account Administrator. Please enter the desired password again.“. After spending some [...]

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I’ve often seen enterprise workstations have their CPU randomly spike to 100% usage for a few minutes, making the machine completely unusable. A quick look at the Task Manager shows svchost.exe being the culprit. 95% of the time, the below process will fix your problem. Create a batch file and put the command shown below into it. Download windowsupdateagent30-x86.exe [...]

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