Windows 10 safe mode

Had a very odd problem with a Dell OptiPlex 7440 All in one.  The keyboard and mouse stopped working.  But when you go into the bios they work fine.  I found a post in the Dell forums indicating it might be because of the power management settings in device manager for the USB Root Hub.  That sounds like a plan, so I try to boot while hitting F8 but I can never seem to get it into safe mode.  Apparently Microsoft is aware of this.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/b8/2012/05/22/designing-for-pcs-that-boot-faster-than-ever-before/

I guess you need to interrupt the boot sequence 3 times to force windows recovery environment that allows you to get into safe mode.  I just pulled power 3 times and it worked but safe mode still didn’t give me keyboard and mouse control.  So I used RDP to get access to the box and found the USB controller driver was bad in device manager.  After removing it and scanning for hardware changes it worked again.  I still unchecked the box in properties that says, “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power” just to be safe.

Scroll lock lives

I was doing some drawing updates using Visio yesterday and noticed that I couldn’t move a selected shape using the arrow keys.  I figured it was just some configuration in the file and I’d try to figure it out later.  This morning I’m working in Excel and notice that the arrow keys scroll the window instead of moving to another cell.  A quick google search revealed it was caused by scroll lock being on.  Yep; and now I remember I was cleaning my keyboard yesterday and must have inadvertently hit that key.

Migrate clients to a new DHCP server

We’ve decided to migrate our DHCP services off the domain controllers and onto a DHCP failover cluster.  We needed to find a way of getting the clients to migrate over without rebooting them and without the sledge hammer approach of turning off the old DHCP service.  We came up with a slow and safe method for forcing the clients to migrate with minimal impact.  

KMS configuration for non-domain joined hosts

We are getting ready to deploy HBSS on our network per security guidlines.  Going through the settings we found out that the McAfee ePO server isn’t supposed to be domain joined.  Kinda goofy but that’s easy to deal with.  As we read further it says that if the ePO server is virtualized then the host can not be domain joined.  Fine, so we  repurpose an old server, install the OS but it’s not activating because it’s not domain joined.  Here is the simple solution.

First, change the product key if needed using these: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff793406.aspx

Next open a command prompt and enter slmgr.vbs /skms [ip address] where [ip address] is the address of your KMS server.

Then type in slmgr.vbs /ato and it should activate.