While I sometimes long for the day when I no longer have to deal with unexpected Windows 10 behavior, there’s something rewarding about quickly finding a solution. In the process, I often end up with an idea for a blog post I can share with thousands five regular readers. A couple of weeks ago I helped a customer solve a particularly weird case: the "legacy" printer management (meaning that Windows will not manage the default printer) was enabled and yet - for some reason - the default printer kept changing for end-users to "Microsoft Print to PDF". Obviously something was broken so I had to investigate.

This case is my favorite kind of case, one where I use PowerShell to solve an issue affecting a customer. The problem at the root of it is also one you might run into if you are using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) to apply language packs and features on demand during OSD, making it an ideal troubleshooting example to document and share.

A key part of any complete end-to-end deployment project is analysis of the resulting logs to identify root causes for hiccups you may run into during your deployment process. This is part of the new "data driven" mentality because operating system deployment (OSD) is highly complex and contains many moving parts. You can save yourself a lot of time and energy if you know where to look for answers. I can’t stress enough how invaluable log files can be in tracking down deployment issues!

I bet many of you, like me, performed system maintenance duties for your family. Last week my mom complained that her Windows 10 PC was extremely sluggish. For example, when she opened Microsoft Edge - which I consider to be the best and the most secure web browser on the market for nontech savvy folks - it took round about 10-20 seconds for the browser to become responsive. I had no choice but to investigate. After a couple of minutes with SysInternals tools, I was able to determine the cause and to come up with a workaround.

I haven't blogged the last couple of days because I was busy answering questions on TechNet. A couple of posts ago I talked about the importance of spending some quality time on TechNet as it may bring interesting cases to your attention. Today, I would like to highlight one of these cases in hopes that someone from the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit Team team is out there listening.