Here are links to the driver packs for various Microsoft Surface devices, including Surface Laptop and Surface Pro. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-au/surface/manage-surface-driver-and-firmware-updates They're all available as msi installer packages and can be installed on top of a vanilla Windows 11 installation or slipstreamed...
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If you're using Windows Defender as your primary antivirus, then it's pretty easy to start an offline scan – simply go to the Window Security app > Virus & threat protection > Scan options > Microsoft Defender Antivirus (offline scan)...
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I've got a few clients who use Google Workspace as their main platform, but also need to use Microsoft Office or Teams, so have a Microsoft 365 tenancy as well. It gets to be a pain managing two sets of...
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Automatica is a boutique consultancy that keeps creative small businesses humming. We tame Macs, wrangle the occasional Windows machine, and dive deep into Microsoft 365 and Dropbox. We are all about using the right tool for the right job, and...
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In trying to find the IP address of a switch on the network, I first turned (without much hope) to performing a Bonjour discovery on the network, but as expected the switch was not advertising itself via this protocol. In...
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If you're deploying Dropbox to multiple systems, there's now an Enterprise Installer available from Dropbox which has a postinstall script to properly initialise the Dropbox Updater. I've been deploying Dropbox and using an old script that seems to be working,...
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I've got a client for whom I've set up federation between their Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra ID tenancies. Google Workspace is their primary platform, and their Identity Provider (IdP). They also use Microsoft 365 Apps for Business and/or Microsoft...
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I'm putting this up as a duplicate of my recent post detailing how to bypass TPM checks when installing Windows 11 on an Intel-based Mac mini with 8th-gen CPU. https://automatica.com.au/2025/05/bypass-windows-11-tpm-check-from-within-the-windows-11-installation-assistant/ First you need to have macOS up and running on...
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Today I needed to install Windows 11 on a late-model Intel-based Mac mini. The Mac mini has an 8th gen Intel Core i3 CPU, 8GB RAM and 250GB SSD. It supports everything Windows 11 needs, including secure boot, with the...
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I recently needed to do a clean install of Windows onto some specialised hardware – a PC that was custom built as a controller for some industrial equipment and the onboard SSD had died. As it turns out, the onboard...
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