Appx’s are a method used for application install, first delivered in Windows 8.1.
There are a lot of builtins which take live system resources in hidden fashion, usually not showing up in Task Manager very much or at all. And there have been a lot of changes in this over recent years. Here’s an overview of items for cleanup as of this writing. One can free a lot of resources on machines this way.
The first thing to know is that many appx’s are “provisioned”, they are embedded in the current (“online”) DISM image, and will be automatically activated whenever a new user profile is made. To get a list of these:
Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Sort-Object | ft DisplayName, PackageName
To get a list of all apps installed for all users, in nicely sorted form:
Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Sort-Object | ft
To remove several of these, that I like to have gone in business desktops, both from provisioning and from any user for which any of them may be installed:
#Begin Script
$PackageNames = @(
"Microsoft.Advertising.Xaml",
"Microsoft.BingWeather",
"Microsoft.BingFinance",
"Microsoft.BingNews",
"Microsoft.BingSports",
"Microsoft.ZuneVideo",
"Microsoft.ZuneMusic",
"Microsoft.XboxGameOverlay",
"Microsoft.XboxGamingOverlay",
"Microsoft.XboxGameCallableUI",
"Microsoft.Xbox.TCUI",
"Microsoft.XboxApp",
"Microsoft.XboxSpeechToTextOverlay",
"Microsoft.XboxIdentityProvider",
"Microsoft.YourPhone",
"Microsoft.WindowsCommunicationsApps"
)
$RemovalItems = Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online |
Where-Object { $PackageNames -contains $_.DisplayName }
foreach ($Removals in $RemovalItems)
{
$RemovalName = $Removals.DisplayName
"Removing $RemovalName from provisioning..."
Remove-AppXProvisionedPackage -Online -PackageName $Removals.PackageName
}
$RemovalItems = Get-AppxPackage -allusers | Where-Object { $PackageNames -contains $_.Name }
foreach ($Removals in $RemovalItems)
{
$RemovalName = $Removals.Name
"Removing $RemovalName from user-level install..."
Get-AppxPackage $Removals.Name -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage -Allusers
}
# End Script
The above first gets rid of the provisioned, then the user-level for all user profiles, for the whole list. There are some for which Microsoft prevents all removals; errors are thrown for these.
Categories:
Performance
Categories:
Windows Installer, Updates, Patching
BIOS
Categories:
Windows Installer, Updates, Patching
BIOS
As of Q4 2023, Google and Yahoo are requiring DMARC to be set on the sender side, for many emails to be delivered. Some Office 365 tenants have exhibited similar behavior.
The following TXT record contents:
v=DMARC1; p=reject; pct=100; adkim=s; aspf=s
indicate that both DKIM and SPF are checked, and any email not satisfying both entirely, will be rejected. There is a “relaxed” mode, =r, which allows subdomains. But if you have to allow for some email to be transmitted without DKIM, e.g. from a web site’s or application’s email generator, go with either this:
v=DMARC1; p=reject; pct=100; aspf=s
which does not look at DKIM; or if you must, this:
v=DMARC1; p=none
which is a kind of ‘null’ DMARC, it’s a placeholder such that DMARC exists, but doesn’t do anything. At least one cloud-application vendor is recommending this, but it’s far from clear how Google, Yahoo, and other machines will respond to it, either now or in the future.
To use the above, create a TXT record of name _dmarc
with those contents.
Some more info is here:
www.dmarcanalyzer.com/how-to-create-a-dmarc-record/
Categories:
DNS
Spam/Antispam
AutoSizer:
www.southbaypc.com/AutoSizer/
really works remarkably well. Rather helpful if you bring up ticket note windows or anything else over and over again which need resizing. It repositions and maximizes as desired too. By default it runs by window class (my own preference!) but can address windows by title as well. Sits in the Windows tray nice and quietly and does its job. Lovely!
Newly updated as of this writing, I’m running it on Windows 11.
Categories:
Tools
Sometimes Windows’ relationship with 365, or a user’s profile, or just a user on a PC or terminal server, will not log into 365. This appears to be the result of corruption of cached credentials.
The most straightforward way is probably to nuke all User/Windows/Azure relationship and recreate. As written, this would probably be very bad on a terminal server, because it will nuke the relationship for all users and all profiles. So far, no per-user commands identified.:
Remove 365 accounts from “Access Work and School”, then run these:
dsregcmd /cleanupaccounts
dsregcmd /debug /leave
from administrative CMD, and also from SYSTEM (paexec or psexec can do this), then reboot, then remove from Access Work and School if still there, then set up user relationship(s) again.
But today we have a report that dsregcmd /status did something, unknown, which fixed one terminal server user. Not sure what. Next time I plan to run many tests with this info:
ss64.com/nt/dsregcmd.html
And if you see error CAA5021, do this:
Search for Manage user certificates in the search bar and open it from Best match. Then navigate to Current User\Personal\Certificates and make sure the MS-Organization-Access and MS-Organization-P2P-Access entries are deleted.
No reboot needed for that last.
Categories:
Microsoft 365
Azure
Here’s the download page:
www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-app
This downloads an .MSIX, which one can usually double-click effectively. The link appears to be nicely static at this writing:
statics.teams.cdn.office.net/production-windows-x64/enterprise/webview2/lkg/MSTeams-x64.msix
And some Powershell to do the download and the install:
cd $env:TEMP
curl.exe -O "https://statics.teams.cdn.office.net/production-windows-x64/enterprise/webview2/lkg/MSTeams-x64.msix"
Add-AppxPackage -Path '.\MSTeams-x64.msix'
# placeholder for Enter
Categories:
Microsoft 365
Categories:
Windows OS-Level Issues
There are a lot of smileys out there now. But reliable display can be a question. The original is preserved:
☺
The code is:
ćA;
Categories:
Web Methods
Categories:
Tools
New and Interesting Apps