Category: 1186

As we discover more and more of Windows 8.1, it becomes clear this Windows Operating System has some tweaks to facilitate the adoption of it by end-users of Windows Operating Systems prior to Windows 8. In this series, I’ve already shown you how to force a specific Start Screen Layout. I’ve also shown you how … Continue reading "Is your organization ready for Windows 8.1? Part 8, Start Screen App Pinning"

While I’ve covered the fixed Start Screen Layout feature in Windows 8.1 in the previous blogpost in this series, there’s even more control for administrators to make the Start Screen on Windows 8.1 devices uniform throughout the organization. Today, we’ll look at two more settings. We’ll look at forcing a specific Start Screen background and … Continue reading "Is your organization ready for Windows 8.1? Part 7, Managing Start Screen Theming Centrally"

As part of the new Windows 8 Interface in large networking environments, Microsoft allowed for some customization of the Lock Screen, the Start Screen background and the Logon background. I’ve described these settings as part of my five must-have Group Policy settings to create an uniform look for your Windows 8 clients. Windows 8.1 allows … Continue reading "Is your organization ready for Windows 8.1? Part 6, Start Screen Layout Management"

You can really tell Windows 8.1 was designed with tablet users in mind, since it offers a lot of new features specifically for people using Windows on these types of devices. One of the more intrusive features is the SkyDrive integration. SkyDrive allows users to store their files and settings in the Microsoft cloud and … Continue reading "Is your organization ready for Windows 8.1? Part 5, Managing SkyDrive"

In this series, I’m asking the questions to determine as an admin if your organization is ready to go to Windows 8.1. Today, I’m looking at the ability to automatically download and install updates for Windows 8 interface apps. One of the more prominent new features of Windows 8.1 for organizations. Automatic App Updates are … Continue reading "Is your organization ready for Windows 8.1? Part 4, Automatic App Updates"

With the right hardware and enough time to plan the Windows 8.1 deployment within your organization, it’s time to start looking at the many new Windows 8.1 features you might (or might not) want to take advantage of with your organization. One much anticipated feature of Windows 8.1 by Windows 8 users is the return … Continue reading "Is your organization ready for Windows 8.1? Part 3, Return of the Start Button and Boot to Desktop"

When your organization is running on PCs with Windows versions prior to Windows 8, you might want to look at new hardware to run Windows 8.1 on. While you can still run Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 on a 1GHz processor with 1GB RAM, the impact of running Windows 8 on underwhelming hardware to the … Continue reading "Is your organization ready for Windows 8.1? Part 2, The best hardware for the job"

Microsoft will make it’s next version of Windows, Windows 8.1, available on October 18, 2013 as an update to Windows 8. While this may make it look simple to organizations, already running Windows 8, to adopt this new Operating System, it’s not as straightforward as it sounds…

Last month, Microsoft has released KnowledgeBase article 2862966 An update is available that improves management of weak certificate cryptographic algorithms in Windows as a helping hand to administrators to indicate and/or eradicate the use of weak cryptographic algorithms in their networking environments.

I have written a lot about Active Directory Domain Controllers and Hyper-V in this series. So far you’ve seen recommendations on host configuration, guest configuration, security and converting physical Active Directory Domain Controllers to virtual ones. Today, I’m covering anti-affinity.