Some Notes on the Machines

As of very recently, Intel has divided its NIC support installs into two steps, one being driver, and the other being PROset, software which supports the driver and the hardware. Both are recommended. Here is the page for Windows 10:

www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/18293/intel-network-adapter-driver-for-windows-10.html

Was just shown these, how nice of them!

https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli

This removes all local admins from a machine’s Administrators group, except the built-in Administrator and “Domain Admins” if it’s on a domain.

$LocalDomain = $env:USERDOMAIN
$DomainAdmins = "$LocalDomain\Domain Admins"
$ComputerName = $env:COMPUTERNAME
$OEMAdministrator = "$ComputerName\Administrator"
Get-LocalGroupMember Administrators | ForEach-Object {
	$UserName = $_.Name
	"Found: $UserName"
	If (($UserName -ne $DomainAdmins) -and ($UserName -ne $OEMAdministrator)) {
		"Removing $UserName from local Administrators group."
		Remove-LocalGroupMember -Group Administrators -Member $UserName
		}
	""
}

When trying to get SVI contents out and vssadmin and diskshadow don’t work, this may:

wmic
(then it its own command prompt) shadowcopy delete

It will require “Y” and “Enter” to be pressed, it will do one at a time. One can also have it delete all noninteractively:

wmic shadowcopy delete /nointeractive

and in Powershell, one can run that noninteractive as a job:

Start-Job -ScriptBlock { wmic shadowcopy delete /nointeractive }

Some new data:

https://wiki.msp.exchange/troubleshooting/windows/windows_update/reset_windows_update_reboot_flag

Something new. Reported to help a lot, especially with Internet connections higher than 10Mbps.

Basically, we browse here in the registry:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters

we create (or edit) DWORD IRPStackSize, and we set it to 32. Default is 15, and Microsoft reportedly says that values 33-38 are fraught with peril.

There are a lot of cartoon-ish smileys now in character sets, but I like the originals, they are gentler and don’t intrude so much. They were transferred to Unicode quite a while ago, and here they are:

Many fonts have them in uneven sizes. “DejaVu Sans”, among many others, do them very well.

If group policy cache is clear, group policy bugs are ironed out, and you still see bad/nonfunctional printers forcibly recreated and/or print-over-RDP doesn’t work, try this (you’ll need psexec) in administrative CMD:

psexec.exe -s reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider" /f
psexec.exe -s reg delete "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM" /f
psexec.exe -s reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM"
psexec.exe -s reg delete "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\DeviceClasses\{0ecef634-6ef0-472a-8085-5ad023ecbccd}" /f
psexec.exe -s reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\DeviceClasses\{0ecef634-6ef0-472a-8085-5ad023ecbccd}"

Any SMB-mapped printers will be deleted or grayed, IP direct printers will remain.

If you see GPO policies get implemented and re-implemented even though the settings have been removed, or if it just doesn’t happen, try the following in administrative Powershell. These clear the GPO cache on the machine you’re looking at.

Remove-Item "$env:windir\system32\GroupPolicy" -Force -Recurse
Remove-Item "HKLM:\Software\Policies\Microsoft" -Force -Recurse
Remove-Item "HKCU:\Software\Policies\Microsoft" -Force -Recurse
Remove-Item "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Group Policy Objects" -Force -Recurse
Remove-Item "HKCU:\\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies" -Force -Recurse

The scenario: a user has a corrupt Windows profile. We don’t want to delete the profile because it may have valuable data. We need to give the user a new one.

1. Log into the PC as a different user, an administrator.
2. Run regedit. Paste the following in the registry location bar near the top: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
3. And hit Enter. Then Find (Edit/Find, or Ctrl-F) the username of the user you are working on.
4. In the left pane, rename the container to .OLD
5. Rename the user’s folder in C:\Users to .OLD as well.
6. Log off, and log on as the user.