Russell Smith

According to Microsoft, 90% of security threats start from malicious email. And while it would be nice to think that customers using Exchange Online Protection (EOP) should always receive the highest level of protection, the reality isn’t quite so simple. EOP is a complex service. It provides a lot of granular configuration options and the…

Notepad is a simple editor that has been included as an inbox application since the very early days of Windows. Notepad is still part of Windows 11, but it is updated independently of the operating system via the Microsoft Store. In Windows 11, Microsoft can deliver updates to Notepad faster than in previous versions of…

If you want to spin up an isolated Windows 10 desktop quickly, without the knowledge required to work with virtual machines (VM) or the cloud, then Windows Sandbox is the answer. How does Windows Sandbox work? Windows Sandbox is a feature in Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, and Education SKUs, which provides users an easy way…

Microsoft patches 103 security vulnerabilities this month, including PrintNightmare, a Windows DNS Server bug, 3 elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in the Windows kernel, and much more. Windows and Windows Server Let’s start with the bug that surfaced earlier in July month called PrintNightmare. PrintNightmare Microsoft issued an out-of-band cumulative update (CU) for a remote execution…

If you are using PowerShell scripts to automate tasks in your environment, sooner or later, there’s a good chance that you will need to deal with elevating privileges to access resources that require a different set of credentials than those being used to run the script. For example, you might need to access a file…

Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2022 was released to OEMs for testing earlier this month. And in a presentation last week, we got more detailed information about the features included in this release. Best on Azure Microsoft is pushing Azure as the best platform for hosting Windows Server 2022. And for the first time, there…

Microsoft launches Windows 11, Windows Server 2022 gets hotpatching, and ARM64EC promises to make it easier for developers to port x64 apps to ARM. It’s a bumper news month and possibly the most interesting in many years for Windows. Microsoft launched Windows 11 at a special event on June 24th. And while a leaked build…

If you prefer the ‘classic’ Windows 10 Start menu, or if you want Live Tiles back, then Windows 11 gives you the option to revert to the Windows 10 Start menu. Microsoft could remove the ability to switch back to the Windows 10 Start menu in Windows 11. But I expect to appease enterprise users,…

News and Interests on the Windows 10 taskbar is a new feature that is turned on automatically for all users of Windows 10, version 1909 and later. News and Interests is a little controversial because some people see it as more of a distraction than a useful tool. It shows the current weather next to…

It doesn’t happen that often but sometimes Hyper-V virtual machines (VM) hang when you are trying to shut them down. And you end up with a VM in Hyper-V Manager with a status of ‘Shutting down’ that no longer responds, and it can’t be forced to shut down using the normal controls. Even the PowerShell…

Hyper-V is the built-in hypervisor that comes free in Windows and Windows Server. It is used to run virtual machines (VM) on Windows. Virtualization is also used for other features, like Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), Windows Sandbox, and Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG). Developers sometimes use virtualization with Visual Studio to run device emulators. Microsoft introduced…

Windows Server 2019 is almost as easy to install as Windows 10. And in this article, I’m going to take you step-by-step through the process of installing Windows Server 2019. Windows Server 2019 installation media If you don’t have access to the Windows Server 2019 .iso directly from Microsoft or a partner, you can download…