7-Zip 15.10 x86 and x64 silent installers

7-Zip is a excellent open source  file archiver with a high compression ratio

For those who may need to install 7-Zip 15.10 to users silently. Download either of these packaged executable's for x86 or x64 click below link.

Updated November 3, 2015

Run with administrator rights.

CutePDF Writer Silent Installer

CutePDF Writer Silent Installer

Portable Document Format (PDF) is the de facto standard for the secure and reliable distribution and exchange of electronic documents and forms around the world.  CutePDF Writer is the free version of commercial PDF converter software. CutePDF Writer installs itself as a "printer subsystem". This enables virtually any Windows applications (must be able to print) to convert to professional quality PDF documents - with just a push of a button!

If users in your environment need to create simple PDF files from their documents then installing this can solve the problem and save big dollars over installing Adobe Acrobat and users do not usually require if all they need is a converter.

The silent installer also installs Ghostscript which is required by cutepdf writer to convert  PS2PDF

To convert your document to a pdf file simply print it to the CutePDF Writer  and when prompted for a file name, choose the name for the pdf file.

Firefox 28.0 Silent Installer

Mozilla Firefox Web Browser is a good alternative to Internet Explorer. We install it in our environment so users have a choice and so support have a choice to troubleshoot browser issues.

This is a silent installer for Firefox Web Browser 28.0 Use if for when you may need to push out Firefox to users silently.

After Outlook 2013 Widows Update (KB2817630) Outlook Folder Pane displays as empty

After applying the Outlook 2013 Widows Update  (KB2817630) released on Sept. 10, 2013 your Outlook Folder Pane displays as empty.

To resolve the issue close out of Outlook and go to Control Panel > Programs and Features >View installed Updates and remove all instances of KB2817630 I had two versions installed and removed both.  After re-launching Outlook the folder pane was back to normal.

Windows Server 2012 R2 Generation 2 vm's now support PXE booting using standard nic

A great new feature in Windows Server 2012 R2  is the ability to create Generation 2 vm's.

Generation 2 vm's support PXE booting using the standard nic.  Unfortunately it only applies to Server 2012 and 64bit Windows 8 or higher systems only.

For anyone who has ever pxe booted into a mounted capture boot iso using the legacy pxe nic the image creation would take an extremely long time since copying the image to your network share would be limited to the legacy adapter 100 Mbps speed. So a copy process which might normally take 30 minutes on a 1Gbps network would end up taking 300 minutes. Ouch!!

Thankfully, with Windows Server 2012 R2 Generation 2 vm's image creation at least of Server 2012 and 64bit Windows 8 or higher will be at the speeds of your standard nic up to 10 Gbps. This will greatly reduce the creation time.

 

Prevent Server Manager from auto starting

Click Manage > Server Manager Properties and checkmark “Do not start server manager automatically at logon

MDT 2012 using Driver Groups

Managing drivers in MDT 2012 using Driver Groups

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 has some nice improvements to its successors in the driver handling department. You can use Driver Groups or Selection Profiles. In this tutorial I will describe using Driver Groups to manage drivers in MDT 2012.

Firstly we will build the ‘Out-of-Box Drivers’ folder structure and import drivers. I have subdirectories for each architecture, brand and model.



To build up the folder structure you have to know the model name of your hardware. To retrieve the proper computer name execute at command prompt: ‘wmic csproduct get name’, to get the exact name WMI queries to determine the computer model. In my case the computer name is “Latitude E4600”.

Now that we have drivers imported in our Deployment Share, it’s time to move on

At deployment phase MDT uses WMI to query the proper computer model and only the current model drivers will be injected. In order to get this working properly, you have to use the EXACT model name in your Out-of-Box Driver tree. You don’t want to query dead horses.

Inject the correct drivers in your Task Sequence

Add a new step in your Task Sequence to inject the correct drivers.  Select Add > General > Set Task Sequence Variable



I usually place this new variable in the node just above the Inject Drivers Node.



MDT will query the computer name and inject the drivers which corresponds with the computer name from the Out-of-Box folder structure, right before applying the image at deployment.



I use ‘DriverGroup001’ as Task Sequence Variable, and windows 8 x64\%Make%\%Model% as value for my Windows 8 x64 Task Sequence . You have to adapt this to your Out-of-Box tree.



Finally, you want to go into you're Inject Drivers node and make sure you're not using profiles

Selecting Nothing in the Choose a selection profile and choosing the install all drivers from the selection profile. Which in reality is turning off plug and play.  Note that if you leave  the Choose a selection profile set to all drivers,  the task sequence is going to inject the drivers in your matching  folder and all the other folders.



If you don’t like to use a new Task in your TS, you can add DriverGroup variables in customsettings.ini like this:

DriverGroup001=%Make%\%Model%