Just another group of tasks to add to your arsenal. We run a Check Readiness step before our upgrades, with a minimum of 20GB Free. We have many clients that do not meet this minimum requirement and fail, and then have to remediate. While we have long term plans to automate much of this, and prevent the Task sequence from ever running on machines that don’t reach these pre-reqs, for now, a Band-Aid.
gwblok
ConfigMgr Task Sequence Collection
This is my “Clip Show” blog post, but hopefully you still find it useful.
I’ve been building out a Task Sequence that is just a collection of Task Sequence sections, or handy steps. I’ll use this TS to pull sections from when I create new Task Sequences, and add / modify as I test in “Real” deployment Task Sequences. DOWNLOAD HERE *Note, this is not an actual Deployment TS, it’s meant to be imported and then have parts copied into your own TS. All content, including some not used directly in this TS is included.
Change Lock Screen & lockout users during Upgrade TS
Update 2017.10.26 – After a twitter convo with @brookspeppin, I added two additional steps for the legal notice. I had ones to delete them, but Brooks said he had used them as the upgrade message, skipping everything else. This was something I had considered, but after talking it over with the team, decided against it “No one reads that”, but after seeing Brooks’ screen capture, I tend to agree that it’s worth having in your pocket, so I’ve added it to the Task Sequence Export that’s available to download. Here is a screen capture and keys needed.
Change and Restore Power Plan during TS
Ok, so this is old news. You change your Power Plan to High Performance during your TS to speed up the process. So maybe you did that for a software upgrade (office, or Win10 Build upgrade), and then your user complained that the power settings were different than how they had configured it.
How about you grab the current power plan, put that in a TS Variable for later, change your power plan to High Performance, then after all your work is done, set the Power Plan back to the original plan using that TS Variable… that sounds good right?
ConfigMgr OSD Lab–Add AutoLogon Account
*Not recommended in Prod, this creates a local account with password, password is in plain text in the TS, Scheduled Task & Registry.
Update 2018/11/09 – After the discovery yesterday of how OOBE removes those AutoLogon Keys, I’ve created a Scheduled task that I add during OSD that adds the keys post OOBE. It’s pretty ugly, but it works. Basic idea: Scheduled Task adds the keys, removes the task, and reboots the machine after 5 minutes. Trigger: Machine Turns on. See more below.. All in all, it adds about 20 minutes onto the process, but you can tweak the reboot delay and shave off a few minutes.
Update: 2018/11/08 – This no longer works with new versions of Windows 10. During OOBE stage (Post Task Sequence, Pre First Logon), the OOBE process deletes two keys: “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon” Values: DefaultUserName & AutoAdminLogon If you have it skip OOBE in your unattend.xml, it works, however that setting is deprecated.
Original Post:
I added a local admin account (Non-Domain) that autologon’s on to the computer after OSD purely to speed up my testing. This way I don’t have to wait for First Logon, after OSD, it will reboot, then autologon as the account I’ve Created.
Make sure you add the SMSTSPostAction to reboot, so you don’t get that Group Policy Error the first time you try to logon. (As explained by Niall)
I’ve created a Task Sequence Variable at the start of the TS, that allows you to trigger the AutoLogon Group. Simple Enable or Disable this step to have the Group run.