Author: Jonathan Bennett

  • Disk of Drivers

    MDT and ConfigMgr Build Drivers for Windows 7

    Overview When doing Windows 7 builds in either MDT 2010 or ConfigMgr 2007 you have to download and install a selection of drivers that are to be installed in your images. Some drivers are used for the WinPE boot image so that the boot image can access the local harddisk (a boot critical driver) and…

    (Read more…)


  • Setting a UK Keyboard in ConfigMgr 2007 OSD

    Overview In the UK, we actually get the US version of Windows 7 and Office 2010, so whenever I do any build engineering in either MDT or ConfigMgr one of the first things I need to customize are the regional settings. In particular the keyboard layout and location. There are many ways to achieve this…

    (Read more…)


  • ConfigMgr 2007 OSD Folder Structure

    Overview When configuring ConfigMgr 2007 Operating System Deployment (OSD) there are an endless number of applications, operating system images, operating system install files, drivers, source files, package files, temp files. Everytime I set it up I end up with a different structure so this blog post presents an example ConfigMgr 2007 OSD folder structure that…

    (Read more…)


  • Get Selected Microsoft TechNet Library Content Offline

    Overview No-one can ever know everything they need to know about Microsoft products and techies will freely admit that they spend half their time checking resources such as Microsoft TechNet while working on a problem or design. Sometimes I need to go on to a site where I won’t have internet access. As anyone who…

    (Read more…)


  • AutoIt Featured

    App-V Recipe: AutoIt v3

    Overview This blog post will show you how to sequence AutoIt using App-V 4.6 SP1 (the latest version at the time of writing). Now, AutoIt is probably the easiest application to sequence in the world and doesn’t really need a blog post describing how to do it. However, I intend to write some more posts…

    (Read more…)


  • AeroFlip

    Windows 7 Aero Theme Not Enabled After Deployment

    Overview An issue I saw a number of times at customers was that the Windows 7 Aero theme was not enabled after deployment. I saw this numerous times in early workshops and pilots for customers and completely forgot about it until I saw the question asked again a few weeks ago. So here is a…

    (Read more…)


  • Windows 7 Self Optimizing Boot Process

    Overview You may have heard the about the fact that Windows 7 (and actually, Windows Vista too) has improved boot up times over Windows XP and dismissed it as “that there marketing speak”. Surprisingly, it’s actually true! On top of that, the boot process is also optimized over time to make things even faster. This…

    (Read more…)


  • Speedo

    Windows Performance Toolkit: Simple Boot Logging

    Overview Troubleshooting slow boots and logons are a common request. In this post I will show you how to perform boot logging using the Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT) on a Windows 7 machine and perform some basic analysis of it. Preparation First, you need to install the WPT on the machine you wish to examine.…

    (Read more…)


  • Speedo

    Windows Performance Toolkit: Installation

    Overview The Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT) is a suite of tools designed for measuring and analysing system and application performance on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. They can be used by enterprises to log and analyse clients in order to detect and optimise performance problems. I intend to use the…

    (Read more…)


  • Blog

    Welcome to the AutoIt Consulting Blog!

    Overview Welcome to the AutoIt Consulting Blog! This blog will share tips, tricks and scripts related to Microsoft Windows deployment and related technologies. Until we start blogging in earnest, here are some links to some articles done by myself (Jonathan Bennett) for my former employer Microsoft MCS on the excellent Deployment Guys blog. Send us…

    (Read more…)