Todd's Blog

Surface Pro 4, Surface Dock and DVI Problems

posted on January 11, 2017

I’ve been working at a customer back in the fall who was were planning to deploy 60 Surface Pro 3 devices running Windows 8.1 Enterprise (they had been sitting on them a bit) along with the Surface dock and external monitors and network connections. We had some issues to work through and here is my learning.

When unboxing the current round of Surface Pro 4, they don’t detect the Surface Dock. It flashes on the power adapter and then turns off. I created a guide for those setting these devices up.

First you want to boot into Windows on the device. Adjust the date and time, especially if you are using System Center Configuration Manager to deploy the operating system to the tablet. Next, you should have downloaded the drivers for the tablets from Microsoft. If you haven’t here is the link to the Surface Drivers https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=38826

Next install the firmware updater and and the drivers. Don’t worry that you are going to be reloading the operating system on it. Once this is complete, reboot and go into the BIOS. You can now change the boot order so the the USB device is first in boot order (or PXE if you use that instead). Select this save, and with your boot stick plugged in, reboot.

You don’t have a boot stick? No worries, go into configuration manager, add the Surface Pro 3 drivers and create a boot stick. I make sure all surface drivers (not just network and storage) are on the stick as it seems to do more and work better for these tablets. The experience around Surface Pro 4 drivers seems to be better. (I just use Network and Storage on Surface Pro 4 with Windows 10, no issues)

Using the boot stick, boot up and the machine will reboot on its own a couple of times, but now the new surface dock will work with the device. It won’t recognize the dock before the firmware is updated. The docking station does seem to work fine.

The next issue we found was not all cables are the same. The mini display port to DVI cables didn’t work with the dock but do work with the Surface Pro 3. Apparently there is an active cable or passive cable. We had passive and the dock didn’t work with them but it works fine with an active cable.

For those of you deploying Surface Pro devices, I hope this helps if you are stuck. Feel free to reach out if stuck.

Enabling UEV in Windows 10 1607

posted on November 16, 2016

Something new in Anniversary Update is UEV. Microsoft has moved it out of MDOP and put it into the operating system. Enabling and configuring it is pretty straight forward.

First you need Enterprise edition to make it work. Don’t have it, don’t even try this, it won’t work. If you have the MDOP version installed on Pro, upgrading it disables it. Word of warning.

Second you can use PowerShell and run:

Enable-UEV

You might think you are done. You are not, you have to enable the default templates.

Command for that is pretty straight forward:

That’s all there is to getting this going. Default save location is the home drive for the user. So if that is defined in AD, you are all set. If not, you can use GPO to set the storage location. Your choice on how you do this.

WiFi disappearing from Windows 10 Laptop

posted on August 10, 2016

I’ve been running Windows 10 on my laptop since I got it 4 or 5 months ago. It’s a Lenovo X230 i5 12″. Nice and light and pretty decent. I picked it up used off of eBay from a refurbishing company. It’s been doing well but lately I’ve noticed that my WiFi just disappears after sleep or hibernation. A reboot brought it back until recently then nothing would bring it back. My LTE connection works though but WiFi was grayed out. Not sure why, but I figured this had to be a Windows 10 issue and not a flaky hardware issue.

I guess when checking the network connections I was seeing it up and active, but I just couldn’t connect. Here is a lovely screen shot. You can see, I can still enable mobile hotspot, but WiFi is gray which made me wonder just what the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot was going on.

The Fix

I do what most IT people do now, Google for the answer. You will find quite a few hits on the issue http://bit.ly/2aE0rKE was the link I thought closely resembled my deal and it had a couple of suggestions.

One suggestion is to run a reg delete which when ran just said the registry key couldn’t be found.

The next step is to run netcfg, which again after running from the command prompt as admin, did nothing. Both commands just threw errors. I also disabled my firewall’s VPN software as the article indicated issues with older VPN client. I disabled the VPN client and rebooted. One of these two things fixed it up and allowed me to get WiFi fired up again.

I don’t know which of the two things fixed it but I’ll update this post as I learn more about the solution. I am glad to have my WiFi back but I also want to ensure that I know what the root cause is for this problem.