Window Cleaning (part 4): Audit Mode Antics

Last week, we saw how we could set up these unattend.xml files with Windows System Image Manager... but what does it look like when we actually go use them? This is the last step before we put everything together, I promise! Today, I'm demonstrating what it looks like when Windows Setup gets told to bypass all the user querying stuff, and showing you how Audit Mode will let you customize a Windows installation for everybody, even after you move it to another machine! EXTRA CREDIT: Installing Windows Updates (and all application updates!) is important, but you also need to make sure you reboot afterward--BEFORE you use sysprep! You spotted that Copilot was on the taskbar at the end, and I didn't want it to be? That's because I didn't reboot after I had installed the updates to Microsoft Edge. (I only restarted Edge itself before customizing it.) Microsoft is tricky about things like this, unfortunately. Just try to make sure you reboot after all the installations are done, and then you can customize away! Technically speaking, you can also get into Audit Mode from OOBE. But you have to be quick about it--on the OOBE screen, you press CTRL-SHIFT-F3, and it will reboot to Audit Mode instead. I prefer to use the unattend.xml to control which mode I'm booting into, so I don't have to watch the machine quite as closely!