Deploy Windows Clients: Upgrade, Clean Install, and Migration

0:00[MUSIC PLAYING] You know, when it comes to setting up Windows, we kind of have a tendency to think of it as an installation. You might have an empty hard drive. And you've got a NexTech finish your way through an installation, or find a way to somewhat automate that. But really, installation is not the word that's kind of the most significant word these days in terms of setting up your clients computers. Nowadays, really, the word is provisioning. Because provisioning does not always mean an installation.

0:31There may already be an operating system on that computer. Because provisioning, really, is mostly about getting a computer business ready. That's the idea here. So it may have already had an operating system on it. But it just does not have the tools that you need, or might not be configured the way you want to have it, or it might not have the security profile that you need it to to be able to implement. Well, in order to get it there, what can you do? Well, some of the traditional methods for doing this would be a fully manual process, really. So you can start, for example, with a bare metal computer.

1:02And that's just exactly what it sounds like. There's nothing on the hard drive. Or if there was something on the hard drive, then we wiped that device. Wipe the hard drive clean. And then we installed Windows clean. There's still really a good business case for doing this in various installations, such as, you might have a computer that's cut off from the rest of your network. So you can't use any tools that exist on your network, such as WDS, which we'll talk about coming up here shortly. Or System Center Configuration Manager. So it might be an isolated computer, a one-off computer.

1:34You'll still have those around. Or if you're like me, it's your neighbor's computer, or a relative's computer, that you still-- somehow, it's your job to install those computers. Anyway. Then we can also then join those computers, in a business sense anyway-- join them, very often, to an on-premises Active Directory environment. Now, it could also be Azure Active Directory. But just in the most conventional sense, this is often where those kind of installations go. And when it comes to on-premises tools, we're really still talking about various tools that we can use for provisioning, but it's not necessarily involving the cloud.

2:10So this is still why we say on-premises here. Now, this will help to implement an installation in a business-rated computer faster, more efficiently, once you've set everything up, than a bare metal type of an installation, or a manual process. So one of the tools you could use there would be the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit, or the ADK. Now, this involves a lot of different kinds of tools that you can use to, again, get your computers in a more business-ready state. One of those would be things like the Compatibility Administrator that's included with it, a standard user analyzer tool.

2:44These will help you make sure that your applications will run with Windows. There are also several provisioning tools that you can use to, again, help make your computers ready for a business environment, such as WSIM, the Windows System Image Manager. So that's one of the tools you can also use there. We'll talk more about that here, coming up. There's also the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, or the MDT. This is a very useful set of tools that can do a lot of different things, such as imaging. So you can take a reference image, for example, which is kind of a golden image of a Windows computer that has everything configured exactly the way you want it.

3:18And you can make that reference image available for further installations, and laying it down onto other installations throughout your environment. So that's a very useful tool as well. And also, WDS, or Windows Deployment Services. Let's take a look at what that's about. So with this, I'll have a computer over here that needs an operating system. I'll also have a server over here somewhere, or a file share. Let's just call it a file share for now. And it has the Windows installation files on it. Now, normally, what we would have done in years past, is we would have had a CD, even floppy disks, if you go back to Windows 3.1 and so forth.

3:56We'd have some kind of installation media. Later on, we could use a flash drive for that kind of thing as well, which is faster and better in most respects. Did something like a CD. But anyway. That's still kind of onerous to have to carry that around all the time, keep a flash drive on your keychain, something like that. And then just go to each individual computer, and apply that media to the installation. So Windows Deployment Services, which is what this would be, you'd have a file server with Windows files on it. That would be Windows Deployment Services.

4:26It also involves Active Directory, DNS, and the ability for this client to boot to the network. So that's a key part of this. The client has to be able to have a network card that's bootable. So what happens here is, using those tools that I mentioned, things like DNS and Active Directory, it locates this WDS server. And then it downloads the installation files. Now, this is not an image-- at least, initially. This is still normal Windows installation files.

4:57It's just that we don't have to use this media anymore. And we can install any Windows machine anywhere we want to, as long as it's in contact with our WDS server. Now, all of these things so far, at least, in our current discussion, are not really zero touch installations. These are still things where someone has to actually sit at this computer and boot to the network card, which, by the way, may also involve adjusting the BIOS settings so that it can configure that network card to be bootable, and to configure it as, maybe, the first boot device.

5:31So that's still somewhat a manual process. All of this stuff is so far. Now, if you implement something like System Center Configuration Manager-- which, by the way, has been rebranded or renamed as Endpoint Manager, or Microsoft Endpoint Manager. We'll just call it Endpoint Manager for most of our purposes. This is an on premises server here. So we might have an Endpoint Manager server right here. And it also can referenced source files for Windows and so forth. But the main idea with this is, if I have, let's say, have an existing Windows 10 computer here, and I want to upgrade it to Windows 11-- that's still a manual process.

6:09I could use these other tools I've already talked about. However, if I want it to be a zero touch installation-- or a ZTI, as we often refer to this-- I can use System Center Configuration Manager Endpoint Manager to be able to do that, because there's an agent that is on this computer while it's running Windows 10. You can schedule it to install Windows 11. And you can pretty much have an answer file as well, which could be configured as part of this ADK. There's a tool there that we can use for this. WSIM tool.

6:40And then it has all of the installation we need. Because of the agent, it can trigger an installation. And because of this answer file, it can automatically pre-package all of the answers that you're going to need for that installation. And then the user comes in the next morning, and now they have a Windows 11 computer. Beyond that, of course, you're going to need things like applications. So for your Application Management, you can have, again, Configuration Manager, Endpoint Manager. You can have Intune. Those are two tools that could be used to deploy applications.

7:10Endpoint Manager is still the king of doing that if you're using local installations and locally connected devices to your corporate network. Intune is still useful for that. And it's a great way to do it. However, that has also got an emphasis for those computers that might be disconnected from your main corporate network, home users, and traveling users, and remote offices, and things like this. So those are all methods of installation and provisioning. There's also still the in-place upgrade. Remember, we talked about this computer here, we wanted to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11.

7:45We used Endpoint Manager for that. Well, you can still just do an in-place upgrade-- again, using conventional media on a Windows 10 computer, for example. And upgrading it to Windows 11. And in our next Nugget, we'll take a look at dynamic provisioning. I hope this has been informative for you. I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[MUSIC PLAYING] In our last Nugget, we took a look at traditional provisioning. These are tools that we can use, for example, that would expedite the installation of Windows computers. Now, in this Nugget, we're going to be taking a look at dynamic provisioning, which is largely dependent upon cloud resources, and is very useful, because you don't always have connections to your local corporate network. Now let's talk about dynamic provisioning.

0:31Dynamic provisioning is really something that we can use that's not necessarily tied to local on-premises tools. So with this, we can use tools such as Azure Active Directory. Now, I do want to point out, these computers that we're talking about, that were provisioning, they might be local in our corporate network, but they don't have to be. The main idea there is, wherever they're located, they have a connection to some kind of a cloud resource, such as Azure Active Directory. Now, this is where the computer is identified, and where it's located, where its account can be.

1:03And once it's there, it can also have a configuration so that it uses Microsoft's MDM solutions, which is Mobile Device Management. That's normally going to be what we call Intune. With Intune, you can configure a lot of different things about those devices. You can configure certain kinds of configuration profiles, which would set-- if you want to think of it this way-- the rules for how that computer operates, what certain security settings are, various things of this nature. Lots of things you can do with that. It's kind of roughly equivalent to Group Policy objects in an on-premises environment.

1:37But the interface and the way it works is all completely different. Anyway, it does the same type of thing. Then there's also the Windows Configuration Designer. And with this, we can create what we call provisioning packages. A provisioning package is a lot of the questions-- not all of them-- but a lot of the things that you would set up in a next, next, finish installation. We'll be taking a look at provisioning packages later on, because they're used significantly in things like Windows Autopilot, which we'll talk about here coming up as well. Also coming up, we'll be discussing something called Automatic Subscription Activation, which is where you can take one edition of Windows, like Windows 10 or 11 Pro, and automatically upgrade it-- or step it up, if you will-- to Windows 10 or 11 Enterprise, or Education Edition.

2:22Again, more to be seen on that. Coming soon to a theater near you. All right. There's also Windows Autopilot, which is a fantastic new way to deploy Windows as well. This involves an existing installation of Windows. However, that existing installation of Windows might be out of scope for what we need. It might not have kind of the configurations that we need. It might have leftovers from a previous user that-- it's just cluttery, if you will. And we want to reset it to a new, fresh, business-ready environment.

2:55So that's dynamic provisioning. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[MUSIC PLAYING] Oh, the age old question, should I upgrade or should I do a clean install? Generally speaking, an upgrade is going to be easier. However, you can also inherit some problems. Whereas, a clean install gives you a more reliable installation. But let's go ahead and take a look at some of those details. And as we take a look at this, you've got to ask yourself, why would you want to upgrade? Well, first of all, that is Microsoft's recommendation. It's really not a bad idea.

0:30In a system that's already working OK-- let's say, under Windows 10, and you want to upgrade to Windows 11. If it's OK under Windows 10, then an upgrade to Windows 11 is not a bad idea. You're not having stability problems. You're not having problems with drivers. You're not having malware issues or any other kind of security concerns there. If you're all OK here, then you're probably going to be OK here, provided other things are also in place, such as the necessary hardware requirements and things like this. So with this upgrade, of course, your applications and your data are going to remain.

1:04And that's the big plus here. Because reinstalling all of that stuff, even though there are certain automated ways of being able to do it, it does require a lot more work in the background. You do have to set up a lot more things in advance-- scripts, or some method for installation, or setting up your Endpoint Manager, or making sure that everything's set up for Intune properly, for any applications you have there. You're probably going to be doing that anyway. But again, it helps you to avoid that, at least at this stage. Also, most profile settings are going to persist.

1:37Now, the exception to that could be, for example, if you have certain Start menu properties that don't translate over. For example, we had that one we went from-- what was it? If you upgraded from Windows 7 and you made your way into Windows 8.1, for example. Well, the Start menus are different. So not everything would have translated over there. But the most important parts of that, the applications themselves, and the data, that's really mostly what we're concerned about anyway. Largely, the Start menu is mostly UI items. And if necessary, there are administrative settings that you can configure that set up a pre-configured Start menu with, for example, shortcuts that IT wants to be there for your users anyway.

2:18So that is possible. Now, if you do this upgrade from, let's say, again, Windows 10 to Windows 11, and you run into some problems, you do have 10 days to repent from that bad decision. OK? I wish I had at least 10 days for some of the decisions I've made. Anyway. So you get at least 10 days there. However, if you decide that you want more time-- and this is very useful, especially when you're in the initial testing stages with IT-- then you can decide to use a command like this. And honestly, I can't remember the acronym.

2:49Deployment imaging and servicing management, or something like this. But it's a command line tool. And you just run this as administrator. DISM. And then Online. And then set OS Uninstall Window. And then the value of 60. And when you set this value, then that will give you up to 60 days. And that's the maximum you can go. Now, there's a disadvantage to this. And that would simply be that, what it does is it retains all of your previous operating system in an old folder here. And that old folder contains all of that previous operating systems.

3:22So, obviously, that's going to take up quite a bit of disk space. Now, if you've got an abundance of disk space anyway, there's really no downside to that. But on some systems-- maybe a Surface Book Pro, for example-- that usually is going to have a little bit less hard drive space-- or not really hard drive, but storage space-- than you would have on a normal desktop computer with 2 terabytes of hard drive or something like that. Well, on a Surface Book or some other kind of a mobile device, you might only have 512 gigabytes, or 1 terabyte. And it really might not be enough in some instances.

3:54So you just have to gauge that out for your own situation. There's something else that occurred to me. There's also a registry value. Let me look for it real quick, and I'll show it to you. But there's registry value here that you can also do this setting for. That way, you don't have to script that. You can also put the registry value in, maybe, a policy of some kind, and have that distributed as well. Just as a second option. And so you can see what I've done here, is I've gone into the Registry Editor, which you can do from going to a command line and typing reg edit, or just typing in search, and typing reg edit and pressing Enter. And then here you can see where I've gone.

4:25I've gone to hkeylocalmachine system, and then setup. And then down here under setup, I went over here and created a new 32-bit dword value here, called UninstallWindow as one word. Now once I did that, I double clicked on it to edit it. You can see that it goes to hexadecimal once I've entered in the value. But that's the value of 60. It's easier if you just click decimal, and type 60, and click OK. And then that'll get you what you need right there. So the value there is you can Enter these values, whether you use DISM or the registry value, you can Enter this in a script, or in a policy, whether it's a policy from a configuration profile in Azure, or whether you do it using a plain old group policy object.

5:07Either way. So anyway, that's one of the things that you can do here. Now, some other tips for you as you look into performing an upgrade would be, you usually want to apply the most recent updates. That's just going to help smooth the path into an upgrade. There might be some things that will stop you from being able to perform an upgrade until certain updates have been applied. Also, you want to back up your data. Now, since it's an upgrade, you're supposed to already keep your data. Remember, I already promised you that. However, you just never know, people.

5:37So just as an IT precaution, which many of us have been burned in the past, from thinking that we're going to be able to keep data when it really doesn't happen. Just back up that data anyway. Now, for many of you, that's already done automatically in a certain way, anyway. Because you might have your users using a centralized home directory, for example, which is on a network server, which already gets backed up on a regular basis, or something similar to that. So you may already have that in place. Also, test your applications in advance as well.

6:08You'll want to do this on an IT level. As you're testing things out, just get a sampling, a representative sampling of all the applications you used across your departments. And for larger organizations, that can be hundreds or thousands of applications, people. So, normally, we'll do this in an IT organization. We'll do this per department. So you don't have to do all of those applications yourselves in most organizations. You have some departments that are run by a certain IT groups, and they will test those, and so forth.

6:38So it does get split up. Might make it a little bit easier than having to do dozens or hundreds of those, or thousands. You also check the hardware compatibility, obviously. The big stops there, as we saw, for Windows, especially for a Windows 8 or 8.1, or 10 to 11, is a Trusted Platform Module, TPM chip. That's one of the big stops there. And again, of course, you need to have at least two CPUs and 4 gigs of RAM to get up to Windows 11. There may also be other hardware compatibility issues though.

7:09You might have some older hardware in some of your machines, which is just not compatible with Windows 11. So you'll want to check that out. Now, generally speaking, your existing hardware and software, if they worked OK under Windows 10, then they will probably work just as fine under Windows 11. But always, again, there's going to be certain exceptions to that. But generally speaking, you'll be fine with that. All right. So that's what we have for upgrades to Windows 11. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[MUSIC PLAYING] In our last Nugget, we took a look at whether you could do an upgrade. And remember, an upgrade is going to require that you have, of course, the necessary hardware requirements in place. Now, what we're going to do here is take a look at a certain test that you can run, running from the Windows 11 installation media. And it will test your system to see if you are indeed compatible enough to perform an upgrade. Now, you can see here that what I've done in order to do this, is I've gone ahead and downloaded the installation media from Windows 11.

0:35And it's an ISO file. And you can download that as well yourself. It's easy to Google or to find from a Microsoft website. Here, I just double click on that ISO file, which in Windows will automatically mount it to a drive letter. This is mounted to drive E, as you can see right here. Now, don't run setup here. We always have a reflexive action to just want to click on setup. Don't do that here, because that's not going to be what we want. What we really want to do here is to, yes, run setup, but to run it from a command line, like what you see right here.

1:09And again, this is simply a test of setup. It's not going to actually run setup. So we'll run setup.exe. And we're going to do-- I think all of these switches explain themselves, and what they do. But the main idea that we're looking for here is this last switch for compatibility only. And you can see what that's going to do, is it's going to check for compatibility. And it's only really going to scan the system. So in other words, it's not going to install Windows. It's going to do a what-if scenario. So if we were to install Windows, what would the circumstances be?

1:40Would it be compatible? Now, this may take anywhere between, really, just a few seconds to run, up to maybe five minutes to run. I've already run mine in advance. So we don't have to wait for it. And what we'll have here is, it'll create a directory for you here. Let me go ahead and show it to you. On your Windows drive, it'll create this directory. Dollar sign Windows dot tilde BT. Don't really know what the BT stands for, but there it is. And then there's going to be a Sources folder. And inside the Sources folder is a Panther folder.

2:11And that's where we are right now. Don't know why it's called Panther. I think there was a previous version of Windows, the code name was Panther. So that's probably what they just stuck with. They just never changed it. Now, what you'll see here is a number of different files. There's really only a couple of files that are useful for us in terms of determining what they are. One of those would be the setup activity dot log file. And I've got that open right here. Now, there's not a lot of this that is very readable. It's kind of difficult to wade your way through. It will explain itself to you.

2:42But the main idea here in terms of compatibility, with hardware at least-- is as we scroll down, we should see this section right here. And we can see from this, how much memory we have, for example. And this is in bytes. So you've got to do the math. But that's basically a gigabyte of RAM. Some of you already see a problem here, don't you? Also, how many physical CPUs and how many cores? One. So some of you are seeing another problem there, aren't you? So anyway, let's take a look at another file that will give us a little bit more readable information here.

3:14And that will be this ScanResult.xml file that you see right here. This file will take the results, and put it into an XML file. And I wish they would put this in an HTML file. I mean, they already have an XML. So it shouldn't be that hard to do. But they don't really give that to us. Nevertheless, this is at least something that we can work with. And if I zoom in here a little bit more, you can see this will kind of give us the bare essentials. Oh, I closed it instead of zooming in. Let me try that again. Here it is. And so as I zoom in here, this gives us a summary of the most essential items that are interesting for us.

3:48Now, one of the things you really want to look for is the word hard. And you can see down here that it already identifies that CPU cores is not sufficient. Because remember, in Windows 11, in order to perform an upgrade, you're going to need to have at least two cores. And you need to have how much memory? 4 gigabytes of memory. How much do we have? 1 gigabyte of memory. That's another hard stop right there. Now, this machine has a TPM, but that would be a very useful one to look for as well.

4:18Because many of, especially of older machines, or very inexpensive computers, might not have a TPM. And they will also give you a hard stop for a TPM in this same file. So, obviously, you're not going to run that on every computer you'll have, but you'll probably run that on a representative sampling. So if all of your accounting computers use a specific model of Dell, or two or three models of Dell-- run that on two or three models of those Dells, and see what the results are to see if you have compatibility issues there.

4:49But still a useful tool to go through and see if there are any other incompatibilities present. All right. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] And remembering upgrades is a great way to make sure that you can keep all your data, your settings, your applications without having to reconfigure and reinstall all of those things. However, it's not always the best case in a business sense because there might be certain problems that you would inherit in an upgrade that we want to avoid if we do a clean install, also known as a rebuild. And so let's take a look at why we might want to rebuild.

0:31Well, first of all, you might have problems with apps and hardware. So if you have existing problems with, say, an application and it's not just on a very specific computer with specific hardware, it seems to happen a lot across a lot of different systems of varying types of hardware and varying different kinds of use, well, the first thing there is you probably need to reconfigure that app or get a replacement app for that. But I just want you to be aware in advance if you have problems with that app, it's going to be inherited in a upgrade or a rebuild.

1:05So it's not going to be a magic bullet to just upgrade to Windows 11. Similarly, with hardware, if you've got persistent problems across multiple machines with a particular piece of hardware that you have, again, you're likely to just inherit that problem. So be aware. Also, periodic app and driver updates are more likely to resolve this. So when you first have Windows 11, for example, come out, there may be vendors out there that don't quite yet have the latest drivers that would best support Windows 11.

1:35Now to be fair, most drivers that work with Windows 10 work great with Windows 11, but some might not. So if you just give it a little bit of time and see if your vendor comes out with an update that's particularly useful for Windows 11, you might be able to avoid that problem in an upgrade. But otherwise, if you have either an application that's been giving you problems, if it has an update, well, that might resolve it with Windows 11 specifically. Similarly, you might have hardware that's not working well. But remember, the hardware is only as good as the driver because if the driver is not any good, it can't interoperate with the operating system.

2:08So if you have a driver update as well that might help to resolve that problem, then check for that as well. Now, and then if you have persistent problems with either one of those things, you probably just going to have to consider other products. You're not going to get it fixed with a simple upgrade to Windows 11. Also, you might have inconsistent performance and reliability problems with your machines. And that happens with Windows. And it's to be expected, because it goes through months and years of different users using that machine perhaps and using it in different ways and having lots of leftovers from various applications and things that just get cluttered on that machine.

2:45That's a big word for it, really, by the way. They just get cluttery. Then you might have inconsistent performance and reliability, because it drifts away from the baseline. So we started here with Windows 10, let's say, three years ago, let's say. And then as time has gone by, we have more personalization to it, more clutter that comes up on it. Our boot times get slower. Our crashes become more frequent. And so it's just time, it's just time for a clean rebuild.

3:18You might also have multiple generations of upgrades. I mean, you might have started with Windows 7, and then you went to 8, and you realized what a mistake that was. And then you went to Windows 8.1, which in my opinion really wasn't that much better than 9, but I'm an outlier in that opinion. And then from 8.1, you went to 10. Well, how many generations is that so far before we even hit 11? That's 1, 2, 3, 4 generations of Windows before you even get to Windows 11. So if you've got multiple generations going on there, it might just be time quite honestly.

3:49And that's not very scientific to say it that way, but that's because there's not a lot of science in knowing what can get inherited all along the way here. Again, we want to get back down to this baseline as much as we can. Or you might also want just simpler troubleshooting and support, again, because we're able to get to this baseline right here. It's a known, consistent, steady state of where our operating system is. And we've tested our applications with it. We test our hardware with it, and everything seems to be golden.

4:21Well, we can start from there. Another reason why might be you have persistent malware issues. This can happen where you have some systems that get infected, and they seem to get infected over and over again. Or the same viruses or malware seem to keep popping up. A lot of these malware these days is very, very sophisticated, and it can regenerate itself even after you clean it up. So it's very tricky. And with things like persistent malware, I like to just nuke the whole thing and start all over again.

4:51Also, you might not really have a desire or a need to retain files and/or settings. This might be especially the case if you have computers that are, let's say, in a lobby, that are for public use, or you're in a public library. You don't keep personal users files on there or applications for individual users or anything like that, or trade show machines that you use, or demo computers, that sort of thing. Well, you don't really need to create or keep persistent user files on that. That might be one case.

5:22Or if it is something where you have user files but they're backed up or their data is all centralized anyway. They don't really keep individual files on the local computer. It's all stored on a network drive, or it's all stored in OneDrive or Dropbox or some other consistent corporate solution to retain that user's data. And finally, by the way, it might really just be peace of mind. Especially if you're in this situation where you've had multiple upgrades all through the years and not even sure what version of the operating system you started with anymore, then you might just have more peace of mind getting to this baseline so that you have a known starting point.

6:03Now, there is another consideration here. What if upgrading is not the best solution for you? At the same time, a rebuild or clean install, that's not ideal for you either. Guess what? You have a third option. There's some other considerations here. One of the things you could do would be to use something like app-VIVE. So maybe you have applications that are too top heavy to consuming in terms of the resources that they require to run on your current Windows 8.1 computer. So this is let's say 8.1. And this is your taskbar area and your start menu.

6:35And you really can't run that application on 8.1. Maybe there's a new version that is just choking out Windows 8.1. It just won't do it. You don't have the CPU. You don't have the memory. Well, guess what? You can do something like app-VIVE. So with app-VIVE, your applications are actually stored on an application server of type in that VIVE server. And you might have app 1, let's call it, that's just very, very demanding, and this 8.1 computer can't run it. What you can do is you can use that VIVE. And what happens is the user will click on the Start menu, and then the application will appear right here.

7:08And they click on it the same way they would if it were installed on their local computer. And it opens and it runs really pretty much the same as if they installed it on their local computer. But it's not installed on their local computer. Really, what's happening is it gets streamed from this app-VIVE server. And really, the user is little the wiser. They might not even know that it's really being streamed at all. Similarly, you can use UE-V, which is the User Experience Virtualization, UE-V. There might be a UE-V server over here.

7:40And that takes the user's personal desktop experience, and it also transports it over here. So really, their entire visual experience can be streamed from a different server here. Likewise, you can have them RDP to a virtual machine. So I might have a Hyper-V server over here with a bunch of different virtual machines on it. And the users over here on their really crusty old desktop, they just launch an RDP client. And it will transport, if you will, the entire desktop experience to their desktop here.

8:11So they could get the performance benefit of lots of hardware on this Hyper-V server, even though they're running a very slow, old computer here, for example. And by the way, it doesn't really have to be all that slow and all that old. It might just be cheap, might be new but with very minimal hardware on it, and you don't really want to load it up on each individual desktop. It's probably most cost effective. It's probably more cost effective for you to just load up the Hyper-V server instead.

8:42Also, you could use something like Windows 365. Actually, I think I have one of those still licensed. So let me go in and show that to you. So here you can see I've simply gone to windows365.com. And that takes us to this page here. We can choose that we want a Windows 365 desktop to run. Now what I'll be able to do with this is to run the entire desktop experience from a browser if I want to. Or I can use an RDP connection to the desktop. So anyway, I'm going to go ahead and log in here because I have a license for one of my accounts.

9:15And you can see that it starts up my desktop experience here. Let me get out of the way. You can see here what I've got, I've got a Windows 11 computer provisioned. I've got two virtual CPUs, 8 gigs of RAM. You can choose different sizes for this if that doesn't meet all the needs that you have. And then I can open this in a browser. From here, I can also do a number of other things, such as restart it, restore it to a previous point in time. It creates a little backup snapshots, if you will, so very handy little tools there. But the basic idea here is I'll just open this up in a browser right now and make a connection.

9:48And then now you can see I'm running my entire Windows desktop experience in a browser here. I got a Start menu. I got any applications that I may have installed here. It also retains any settings or work that I was doing previously. So for example, last time I was making this connection, I can't remember what I was doing, but apparently I had a command prompt open here. Apparently I wasn't doing very much, par for the course. I was doing something else. Oh, this is WSIM, I think. Yeah, so I was using Windows System Image Manager. Doesn't really matter what I was using.

10:19The point that I'm telling you here is simply that it retained whatever I was doing here, and I can disconnect from it and reconnect to it and immediately resume what I was doing. It's not like I have to start all over again with an empty desktop. I can go to a full desktop if I want to with this thing right here, full screen. And I can collapse this toolbar if I don't like it being in the way. The basic idea here is, I get an entire Windows 11 environment here regardless of the operating system actually running on this host. And by the way, as you can tell, if you know how to look for this, you can tell I'm running a Mac operating system here by looking at these little buttons up here in the toolbar area.

10:55I'm actually doing this on my MacBook Pro. So there are some ideas for why you might want to perform a rebuild, also known as a clean install, and also ways that you can get around doing either one, really. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] When we send out announcements to our users that there's about to be some kind of an upgrade, a lot of times there's this collective moan from everybody, oh no, not another upgrade. Why is that? Well, a couple of reasons. Number one, people are kind of resistant to change. And a lot of times, an upgrade, whether it's an operating system or a new application, may involve new features that they have to learn, a new y that they have to learn, things like this. But more importantly, really is the loss of data.

0:31And if you've ever lost data, you know how devastating that can be. Now, one of the problems that we run into there is also the user's preferences. That's another thing that we want to try to keep if we possibly can. Now it might sound a little trivial or trite that oh, so they lost their wallpaper a big deal or they had a shortcut that went missing on the desktop. But in reality, that can turn into also data and productivity. For example, do you know anybody that has lots of icons on their desktop?

1:01Sure. Those icons might not just be shortcuts. They might also be data files. Now we tell our users don't store data on your desktop. Keep it in your home directory or OneDrive or some centrally stored file server where we can back up your data. But a lot of times, they don't listen to us. Nevertheless, we still have to be as responsible as we can to try to collect that data. So I have some friends of mine that have enormously cluttered desktops with lots of icons on the desktop. And I just decided to do a Google search for cluttered desktop.

1:34And look what I came up with. Look at all this stuff. This is amazing. Oh, look at this one. Oh, my gosh. Well, let's click. I can't resist. I got to click on this thing. Where is this? Oh, it's from Seventeen Magazine. OK, great. Well, that explains a lot. You'd have to move icons out of the way just to get the stuff that's underneath some of this stuff. Boy, well. Maybe we can take a closer look at this and then take a little quiz on how to know if it's just a crush or true love. Anyway, the point I make there is we need to retain the data as much as possible.

2:06And there are some good migration tools that can do this. There are third-party products as well. But included with free downloads that you can get from Microsoft, you can use the Windows ADK, and that kit includes something called the User State Migration Tool or USMT. Now this is primarily a large scale migration tool. There are other tools that could be used to perform migrations, especially if you're in a one off kind of a situation. In fact, actually let me show you. I think I have the tab open. Go back to a Seventeen Magazine thing.

2:36Let me just close this stuff. Back in earlier days of Windows, they used to have this thing called the Windows Easy Transfer. What you would do is you would take a USB cable, and it was a crossover USB cable. So it'd be one USB to another without a hub in the middle. You just connect two computers together. So you got a new computer, for example, and you've got a new operating system on it. You can transfer everything from say Window-- Windows 7 to Windows 8.1. And then it would supposedly transfer all of your data and your settings over there. Well, they don't support that starting with Windows 10, as you can see here.

3:09So they have, we can see this, partnered with Laplink, as you can see right here, to give us something called PC Mover Express. This is kind of interesting, though, by the way. You click on PC Mover Express, and it takes you over here. This is a company called Laplink. And they used to be really-- they used to really specialized in migrating over all of this stuff, all this kind of data. So this is not useful for a large scale. But if you need to do a one off or you're disconnected from a network or you've got to upgrade your neighbor's computer, this might be a solution.

3:41And I've used them years and years ago. Oh, by the way, look. Trusted for over 40 years. What were they doing 40 years ago? Jeez, 40 years ago, I was using one of these things, a RadioShack TRS 80 for goodness sakes. I'm not sure what they could have been doing back then. That's a long ways back. Anyway, what does this tool do? Well, it uses XML files. And these XML files will then specify any user accounts that are on that computer. So this is for local user accounts. And you will possibly have some local ones.

4:13Could be administrative accounts. But for some reason or another, you might have local accounts as opposed to domain accounts. Usually, of course domain accounts are going to be better. And for the corporation, that's mostly what you're going to be having anyway. But if there are any there, you can collect those, and then those can be migrated over. Also the user files, so anything in their documents folder, for example, all of their normal data storage that they could have locally can also be migrated. Once again, of course, they should keep it all in their home directory and network shares, whatever.

4:45Doesn't always happen that way, though. So hopefully, we can collect all of that. All of the operating system and application settings. Now there are some caveats to that. In the operating system, there's not always a one-to-one correlation. So for example, in some previous versions of Windows, the smart menu-- the Start menu. Hopefully, it's smart. The Start menu would have a different layout and things. And so sometimes there were some things that wouldn't transfer over. But it's somewhat of a minor concession. And the application settings, particularly with things like Microsoft Office, they might have customized toolbars that they've painstakingly put together.

5:22And especially if they're in a specialized area. Engineering, scientific purposes, medical, might also have customized dictionaries, all that kind of stuff. Users sometimes take a long time to put together a really customized set of things that have to be there, that makes their job easier. Now then what kind of a migration could occur here? Well, a migration really-- let's differentiate that as well from a clean install. A clean install does not really consider previous data, previous users as much as a migration would.

5:54By and large, a migration is still a clean install or very often it is. However, with a migration, you retain all the users data. So if let's say here, for example, we have an original operating system, the OG. And it's got all the users settings and data, stuff like that, right? Well, what we could do is we could have maybe a new computer. Maybe this original computer they had some since Windows 7 or something and it's got one CPU, it's got two gigs of RAM, and it can't be upgraded, all the slots are already taken. And it's just not a practical idea to upgrade that machine.

6:26Well, now we have the new computer, and let's say that this is a shiny new HP, still in the plastic and everything. And we want to take all of this user settings over there. Well, we can use USMT to transfer the data. How can we do that? A couple of different ways. Well, we could plug-in, for example, a USB flash drive, use the USMT to copy everything to the USB flash drive. And then, of course, plug that same USB flash drive into the new computer. And using USMT tools, copy the data in to the new operating system that exists over on HP.

6:59So again, maybe this would be Windows 8.1. Maybe this new computer is Windows 11, for example. Now using a USB, that's OK on a one-off basis or a very seldom used basis. But more than likely, we're really going to put all of that stuff, all of the user settings, and so forth up onto a file server here. And then we just copy it down here to the next destination. Now that was a side-by-side type of an installation. Maybe we also could use a wipe and load. So a wipe and load would use a single computer here.

7:30This is our OG. But it's gotten kind of stale. It still has enough hardware to run Windows 11 and everything. But it's been upgraded many times. Maybe we started with I don't know, Vista-- that's going back, to 7. And I can't even remember which one came first right offhand. But then we went to 8. And then we went to 8.1. And then we went to 10. And then now what we want to do is to upgrade to Windows 11. But that would be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 generations of operating systems before we even get to Windows 11. It's bound to be cluttered with all kinds of junk.

8:03That's just kind of how Windows is. So we might be a little uncomfortable with just upgrading that particular computer. If it was just from Windows 10 to 11, probably not too big a deal, or even 8.1. This is too many, though. So what we can do with this is we could take all of the data, all the user's preferences, all the user's data, and everything, and put that usually again on a file share. Could be a thumb drive. But probably a file share. And then what we do is we just nuke this computer. We wipe the hard drive out. And then what we'll do is we'll install the operating system again.

8:34Whatever this new Windows 11. And we copy all the data back down here. And then they retain everything, including hopefully any files, any data files that they had, and all of those shortcuts on their desktop. By the way, I'm going to demonstrate some of this in our next Nugget. And there will be a lab for that as well if you also want to try this out. There's also Scanstate. And Scanstate is part of this whole process. That's what collects the data from the user off of one computer and prepares it to, put on another computer or restore it to the same computer in a wipe and load.

9:07So it gathers all the profile and data. And load state is the other tool. These are executables. We'll then apply that data. So you'll see this in some scripts that I have ready for us to use. Not really scripts. It's just command line commands that I've pretyped for you in our next lab. Now this could be best suited in a scripted environment. So you can deploy a script. Maybe you have some kind of an automation solution that you use. Maybe use endpoint management of some kind. You can send out a script or even policy, I guess, send out a script to copy everybody's data some night before the upgrade.

9:44Has to be pretty soon before the actual upgrade takes place, though. The reason for that is because if you give it too much time like a month or something, then there's a lot of new files that can be copied to the desktop or into their documents folder, or a lot of other changes that could occur. We could experience some loss that way. But even if it's immediately before, there's still a very, very narrow window that someone could have copied a file right at the last minute that we missed. But you want to do it as schedule as soon as you can immediately before deployment.

10:14That's the best way to go with this. Now this can also be run in offline mode. It's a little bit of a more obscure use of these tools. But this would be the case, for example, if we tried to do an upgrade and it was unsuccessful. But it copied all the users data into Windows old. That'll exist, remember, we do have an old folder there that we can roll back our upgrade from within 10 days by default. And we can extend that to 60. So you can take the USMT, have a peek into the windows.old, pull the data out of there and the user preferences out of there.

10:49And then do a wipe and load. Maybe that would be a better solution if it had a failed upgrade, for example, in that instance. You can also run this during WinPE. Remember, WinPE also has a command line window that you can open. And you can start to run these commands directly from within WenPE. And so that might help to abbreviate your workflow there as well. Now stick around for the next Nugget. We're going to go ahead and take a look at how to do this in a lab. I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] All right, in our last Nugget, we took a look at the User State Migration Tool and what its purpose is. Remember, the main purpose of it is to migrate users settings and data into a safe place and then put it back on either the same computer or some other destination computer. Now, what we're going to do here is to simulate the use of that. I do have a lab for you here. I recommend you go ahead and start it now if you want to follow along using the lab.

0:30Also, though, as another option, some people prefer to just watch through the video first and then follow along in the lab on a second viewing. That way you just get a better scope of where the whole thing is going. And also, it might be a little hard to keep up because there are several minutes where there's just empty time where I'm just waiting for something to process while I edit that out. But you don't have that, of course, when you're following along. All right, and then here we have our lab loaded up. Now, I have two domain controllers here and a Windows 11 computer.

1:03Now, I do want to point out, it really doesn't matter which operating system I'm using. I could be using Windows 10. I could be using Windows 11. What I'm going to really be doing here is to simulate the migration. So this could be either operating system. And what I'm going to do is to simulate taking a user's settings and data from one profile to another. Really, I'm just going to transfer everything to a different user, which, by the way, is also another use of this particular tool because you might have a user that's left the company, but the new user that's replacing them has to have all of their files has to have all of their shortcuts and all of their settings on their desktop and applications.

1:42So we're not going to be using DC01 directly. We do have a file share there that we'll be accessing over UNC path. Then we have another domain controller. It's a peer domain controller running. We don't need to use that here either. But we will go to Win11-01 and log on. Now, if it doesn't come up immediately with this logon for PhoenixUser01, hit Control-Alt-Delete. And then Enter in PhoenixUser01 to log on with. It may appear down here. Otherwise, you'll have to type it in. But I think it should appear just like this. Now, once you've done that, you can just either type in the password that you see over here to the right.

2:14Or the easy way to do it is to just click it, and it'll automatically paste in the password for us here. And then I'll just finish the logon. Another thing I'm going to be doing here as well is I'm going to split this off. Notice that I'm clicking the little hamburger stack up here in the upper right. And I'm go ahead and split Windows. The reason why I do that is it's going to give me some more real estate. So I'm going to drag this off to a different location and give us a bigger screen area over here. And so here what we want to do is to take a look at what's in this user's profile. And then we're going to see what kind of settings we would expect to get migrated with the USMT.

2:46So starting with the shortcut that's already on the desktop, we have the calculator, which we can see opening right here. And it's in the scientific mode. I do that to provide the illusion that I actually understand science. And then we also have some data. So let's click on the File Explorer. By the way, my Windows kind of refresh slowly because I have a slow internet connection. I'm recording from another country. I'm not at home right now. So yours probably won't lack as badly as mine is right now. Anyway, now I go into Documents. And, oh, no, there's a My Secrets document here. What do we have in this?

3:17That could potentially be important data. And you can just pause here for a moment if you want to and read all of my secrets. All right, now once we've got that, let's just go ahead and close it. We don't need to make any changes or anything. And then let's also just copy this. I'm going to use the little toolbar up here to copy it. And then I'm going to paste it here on the desktop, just to show that we have some data there that would also get copied over. So when everything's done, if we're successful, what should happen is we'll have both this desktop copy of My Secrets and the one that's in the Documents folder right here.

3:49And let's see just for giggles, let's also put another shortcut from something here. Let's go to All apps. Oh, there's TikTok. You can't live without TikTok, right? So let's put that on the desktop. I actually had to get rid of TikTok on my phone because I find out if I'd wake up in the middle of the night or something I start scrolling TikTok and wasting time on TikTok instead of doing something useful like sleeping. So anyway, good productivity app for us to put on the shortcut here. And let's also put one more on the taskbar area as well. We'll just do this one quick and dirty. Right click on Calendar, let's say, and pin to the taskbar to see if it can retain that one.

4:24While we've got File Explorer open, let me go ahead and show one other thing here. And that is the profiles files that have logged on to this computer in the C drive. And then in the Users folder, we can see we have a local administrator account. We have the domain administrator here that's logged on. PhoenixUser01, PhoenixUsers02, those are the three domain accounts we've had that have logged on before. Now, when you work with User State Migration Tool, you'll migrate all the settings out of one user account. Then you migrate them into another user account.

4:55But what it does is it kind of partially sets up or it pre-stages a profile. The profile that you're stuffing all of those settings into and all that data into it cannot all ready exist. OK, so I could not draw all the data out of PhoenixUser01 and then stuff all the data back into PhoenixUser01. All right? So it has to be a clean profile. I'll probably take it all out of here and then stuff it into PhoenixUser04 I think is an account that I can use. If you have something like a lift and shift, then that's not going to make much difference anyway because it'll be a blank hard drive anyhow when you apply all this data.

5:32If there's already a folder there-- or already a profile there, you'll need to go ahead and delete that before you draw the data back into it. Also, this user must not be logged on when we're running up USMT. So I need to log this user off, not just switch users, but log the user completely off. And then log on as my administrator account in order to be able to run the tools that I'll need to make this work. Another we'll need to be able to do once we log in is to map a network drive.

6:02I'll show you that as soon as we get going here. Well, this is just agonizingly painfully slow, folks. I tell you. All right, so what I'm going to do is go to other user down here in the lower left and enter in the domain administrator, not the local administrator. I can't just type administrator because that will use the local administrator account. I need to do administrator@nuggetlab. And then I'll use the password. You can use again-- you can click on this thing here. You can click on this and pass in the password like that. And it should take it there.

6:33And then we'll go ahead and log on. So now that we're logged on, one of the things we will need to do is to be able to access the tools necessary. And that's of course, going to be the User State Migration Tool itself. If we open File Explorer, then we'll see down here on This PC, we have only the local drive and a D drive. Let's map a drive E to our network resources. So I'm going to go ahead and close that up. And I'm going to click on the Start menu again. And I'm just going to type CMD for a command prompt.

7:03I don't want to run this as administrator right now. I'm just mapping a drive is all. For this, we'll type in net use space and then e colon and then backslash backslash DC01-- that's the name of the server-- backslash. And then there's a public folder there. And that's going to have the tools that we need. I'll go ahead and Enter this and exit the command prompt for now. Oh, crud, I actually clicked on Chat. How do you get rid of this thing? Here we go. Anyway, now I'm going to click on File Explorer once again just to confirm that drive has been appropriately mapped.

7:37And I also need to access some files over there in Notepad. I'm going to go to This PC. There's my mapped drive. If I go into this, we see that there is a USMT folder. There's also a Staging folder. Let's go to the Staging. There's nothing in there now. What this is going to be is I'm going to drop all of our settings that I scoop up from PhoenixUser01. It's going to drop into this location. What I'm going to do here is go into USMT. And the tools that we actually use are in AMD64. It's going to be scanstate and loadstate.

8:07There's loadstate. And scanstate is further down. Of course, it's alphabetical. And I over scrolled. There it is. So those are the tools that we're going to be using there. What I want to do is also access these text files. Now, these are files that I have put there for you just so that you don't have to do a lot of typing and hopefully avoid more risk of things like a typo, which would cause the whole thing to fail. So with scanstate, I'm kind of zooming in here to make everything a little bit more visible with a Control +. We have scanstate. That's the tool that we use.

8:37We're pointing it to drive Z. And we're looking at the store there. Oh, you know what? It's actually going to be the store directory. I got that wrong earlier. It's not the staging. It's the store directory. That's where the profile settings are all going to here. Now, what does this do? There's an forward slash o there. That will overwrite any profiles that already exist there. In our case, I don't really need it because there's already an empty folder there. But just for good measure, I'm going to put the o in there. Forward slash ue will user exclude star dot star.

9:08So in other words, I'm excluding all users. Why would I do that? Don't we have to migrate somebody? Yes. But if I don't do that and then specify which user I want to include, it'll migrate all users. In our case, I'm just trying to make it faster and cleaner and easier to work with. So I'm not going to migrate PhoenixUser01 and 02 because presumably that would take twice as long. And I want to make your lab as abbreviated as possible here. So we're excluding everybody except that. We're going to include PhoenixUser01, which you see right here.

9:39And we're going to migrate the user settings. By the way, these things, these XMLs will have specific instructions on what to migrate over. So there's migrate user, which is user settings. This is an XML file that if you're pretty good with it and you know what you're doing, you can also edit that. And you can include or exclude additional settings if you want to. Same with migrate documents, that'll specify which folders to migrate over. And then migrate app, it doesn't actually migrate application. So that's a little bit misleading I think the way that reads. What that does is it migrates over application settings.

10:12And it should migrate over application settings for apps that have been written according to Microsoft's requirements, which, of course, would include something like Microsoft Office. It doesn't seem to let me scroll over. So let me shorten this again. It does say we want to encrypt it. It could be, of course, security sensitive information in there. And we have a key to decrypt it, usmtsecret. Obviously, that's not very secure on its own. But you can make that more complicated if you want to. And, of course, you would have to protect this particular script or command line because anybody who opens it in plain text can read that.

10:50So you might want to put BitLocker or EFS or something else on it, in addition to normal permissions. That would restrict other users from accessing it. So what I'm going to do is select this whole line. So now that it's all selected, I'm going to right click on it and choose Copy. You can use Control-C if you want. I just do that to make it more intuitive since you're watching the video. Then what I want to do is to go to a command prompt again. So I'll do a CMD here to search for it. And there it is. So I'll go ahead and access that. And then I need to change to the appropriate directory.

11:20I think we're on drive E, right? So I'm going to type e colon, Enter. Do a dir. We can see our folders right there. I need to change directory to usmt. And there was another folder in there, yes, AMD64. So I need to also change to the AMD64. Then we have our scanstate here. We'll just confirm that right here. Yep, sure enough, there it is. I'll clear the screen to make it a little bit cleaner. And now, I'm going to right click and paste in that command, and it should go ahead and start running. Oh, you know what? I just realized I mapped the wrong drive letter.

11:51I had this map drive E. But I should have done Z because that's what's in the command right here. So let's just go ahead and map to drive Z as well just because we have another command later on that will also include that drive letter. So net use z colon backslash backslash dc01 and-- OK, all right, now that command should work. Let's Up arrow a couple of times to get that command back and launch it. Now, of course, this is taking a few minutes. I'm going to cut time in the video so we don't have just empty space here. But on your labs, if you're following along, you may have to pause the video for a while to wait to catch up to where we are.

12:27All right, and then once everything's done, you should see a scanstate return code of 0. And then we're ready to proceed. Now, before we close this out, let's go back to File Explorer. And notice we have these two mapped drives now to the same location. But we'll go to drive Z. And we have the Store right here. And there's the USMT migration that's come into this. Notice that it's kind of a larger file, 742 megabytes in size. So do take that into consideration when you account for possibly migrating multiple profiles off of one computer because that can really start to add up.

13:00Anyway, we're just confirming that it's there. Now, let's go back over here to the USMT and access our other command line. That would be loadstate. So we're going to take that all that stuff that we just exported with the scanstate. And now we're going to load it with loadstate. And here what we have is loadstate. And again, it's going to be loading it from the Z drive where we have everything stored in the Store directory. We're going to migrate a specific user. That will be mu, Migrate User. Nuggetlab, that's the domain.

13:31PhoenixUser01, remember that was the user account and profile that we migrated out. We're going to migrate that in to someone that's never logged on to that computer before and does not have a profile in existence there. That will be PhoenixUser04. Same XML files for the same settings. We're going to decrypt using the same key there. There's also a forward slash c, which kind of ignores a lot of the extraneous errors. For example, a lot of times you'll get an error message about Windows Defender definitions or something like this.

14:02That's kind of innocuous because Defender definitions get updated once or twice a week anyway. So it really does not have much relevance to what we're doing here. So I'm going to go ahead and, again, select all of this. Copy it out. Close that up. I don't need it anymore. Close this as well. But we'll leave the command prompt window open. Just to make it cleaner, I'll clear the screen real quick with the CLS. And now, I'm going to right click to paste in the loadstate. That should then, again, stuff PhoenixUser01 into the PhoenixUser04 profile once it's been created.

14:34It really, again, just kind of pre-stages it. The actual profile itself will be created once we log on as PhoenixUser04. This again will take a little while. So you can pause the playback of the video if you want while you wait for your computer to catch up. All right, now that that's been done, we can exit out of this. And we can log off this administrator account. We should be able to now log on as PhoenixUser04 and to see those settings have come on over. So I'm going to go ahead and sign out the administrator account. Then I'll go down here to choose Other user in the lower left and enter in PhoenixUser04.

15:08Again, I'm going to paste in that password and log the user on. All right, now we have logged on. Let's confirm that by clicking the Start menu. There's PhoenixUser04 down here in the lower left. It looks like we've got some success here. I mean we've got the calculator here. I did notice that probably it's not going to have the scientific view. I don't know why that doesn't come over. But that's a little bit of a small concession to make. Yeah, just the standard view. And then we have the Secrets file on the desktop. That looks like it's all intact and incriminating. Definitely have the TikTok thing.

15:38I've got to make sure not to double click on that. Go down a black hole of TikTok. What else do we have? Documents, yeah, so let's go into File Explorer, go into Documents. And there is, again, another copy of that same file. So there we have it. Oh, we did get this calendar, didn't we, down here on the taskbar area as well? And so it appears that we successfully migrated all the stuff that we wanted to migrate over. And that, my friends, is the User State Migration Tool. All right, I hope this has been informative for you. I'd like to thank you for viewing.