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?

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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.

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Win10 Build Updates–Persistent Tweaks

CONTEXT: (Feel free to skip my babbling) If you haven’t figured out by now, I hate managing things that I feel should manage themselves.  If I can get out of doing extra work, and have things in place to automatically take care of it, awesome.  Even if it’s less efficient on network resources, and I … Read more

Dell BIOS update–WinPE–Model Independent–From Internet

Update 12/18/18 – Dell Changed their Cab XML data, and the part of the script that downloads directly isn’t working.  Checking with @Geodesicz (Mark Godfrey) to see if he has updated his script to accommodate this. Update 5/26 – Updated Script to use Dell’s Enterprise Cab XML data, instead of the ever changing Support Site.  … Read more

Task Sequence Message / Pause with No Package

I’ve created messages and pauses a couple of ways, a “fancy” way with content, based on Niehaus’s blog, and a simple way just using notepad with no content, which is really handy during times you don’t want (or not able) to pull down content yet.  Nash (@kidmystic) would say to use PowerShell (example at bottom), … Read more