This guide is aimed at solving the 0x800F0954 error you can get when trying to install .Net Framework 3.5 via PowerShell or through server manager.

In certain Windows 10 flavours, the traditional Windows Photo Viewer has been removed and replaced with the Windows Photo App which is a per user application from the store, this is frustrating from a management point of view in a multi-session environment such as Citrix or RDS. For example, if you install it from the admin account it will only be available for the admin.

This guide shows you to how find the offline installer/licence file from the store then deploy it into the online image using DISM.

A service stuck in a stop pending state is a frustrating experience. The following powershell script will kill any services stuck in a stop pending state, this script could be saved and ran as a recovery action to automate the recovery of a troublesome service.

There are certain situations where you want to deploy an RDP shortcut and you are unable to do it via copying a file from a shared storage location, for example when using Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) where you cannot copy files into SYSVOL. This guide uses native group policy to create the RDP shortcut on the fly.

Service Connection Points (SCP) are objects in Active Directory that hold information about services. Services can publish information about their existence by creating serviceConnectionPoint objects in Active Directory.

In turn client applications then use this information to find and connect to instances of the service. Some common systems that use SCPs are Exchange, SCCM and Terminal Server.

This guide shows you how to find out what servers are advertising terminal server SCPs and how to delete them if the SCP in question if it no longer exists in your organisation.

There is certain situations where you need to use Legacy BIOS rather than modern UEFI, one example is certain scenarios within disaster recovery in public cloud. 

This of course causes huge pain in existing production workloads, this guide uses a combination of Linux and Windows to convert the GPT disk to MBR and UEFI to BIOS WITHOUT any data loss within VMware.

When trying to download Powershell modules on Server 2016/2019, you may come up against the following error message;

This is linked to the insecure security protocols being used by powershell and it will need to be set to a supported protocol, this could be either if you were behind a proxy configured a certain way or the site you are connecting to only supports certain protocols.

IT Managers and system administrators should be aware of exactly what Server Operating Systems are in use across their environment, if you are unsure you can quickly understand/audit what OS's are running within your Active Directory estate by running the following Powershell commands;

When working with installers or firmware for firewalls, switches, hypervisors etc it is very important that you verify the integrity of the downloaded file in case it has been corrupted in transit to ensure it does not contain errors when running the install.

Fortunately, this can be simply and quickly checked using a Powershell command against the file and specifying the Algorithm.