How to enable/disable Windows Test Mode and also get rid of the desktop watermark afterwards

I've been working on a case with Microsoft for the past year and we finally might have found the underlying issue. In trying to verify whether the issue was correctly identified Microsoft created a private fix for us.

To install this fix you have to jump through a few hoops but it is pretty straight forward.

And while getting your system out of the test mode is just as easy as getting it into test mode - removing the desktop watermark seems to be a different story. Until you know how to.

But lets begin at the top.

"Interactive logon: Machine inactivity limit" policy gets triggered by disabled screensaver's timeout

This is just a quick post about how Microsoft managed to keep me busy for a couple hours on what should have been a simple 5-minute job.

After months and years I have finally managed to get the higher-ups to agree on implementing the "Interactive logon: Machine inactivity limit" local security policy after I proved to them that we have a number of users who do not lock their machines even over night or even the weekend.

Previously all we did was enable the power saving option for the monitor but let the user disable that if they had any kind of issue with it or "simply do not like it".

Anyway, I finally got the green light and enabled the policy with a 1200 seconds timeout on inactivity. And that is were most of my workday suddenly got a lot busier than I had it expected to be.

Oracle's Flash-based "Enterprise Manager Database Express 12c" only displays a blank page

"The year is 2021 A.D. The internet is entirely occupied by HTML5. Well, not entirely... One small management console of indomitable legacy still holds out against the invader. And life is not easy for the tired sysadmins who garrison the unfortified camps of Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight and Java ..."

With the well deserved "death" of Adobe Flash at the end of 2020 everyone had hoped to finally get rid of all the clunky management consoles but life is not that nice to us sysadmins.

A few months after Flash was disabled in all modern browsers and refused to even let itself be invoked through legacy options a co-worker from our server team contacted me and asked if I had any way to still run Flash because otherwise they would not be able to access their "Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Express 12c" console anymore. And from here it all went downhill ...

Windows 10 upgrade fails with error 0x8007001F - 0x20006 ... and a number of other errors

What better pastime on a weekend than trying to upgrade a laptop with Windows 10 1809 installed on it that refuses to let itself get upgraded or install any Windows updates for that matter? I really cannot think of anything ...

But lets start from the top: This laptop has Windows 10 1809 Education installed on it. With an UBR value of 253, which puts its update status on January 8th 2019 ... more than 2 years since the last Windows update was installed.

Every attempt to install a newer Windows 10 version would always fail with the error 0x8007001F - 0x20006, accompanied with the error message "The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during REPLICATE_OC operation." (in German: "Die Installation war nicht erfolgreich. In der Phase SAFE_OS ist während des Vorgangs REPLICATE_OC ein Fehler aufgetreten.")

And every attempt to install any regular Windows updates would throw an "This Update is not Applicable to your Computer." error (in German: "Das Update ist nicht für Ihren Computer geeignet.")

But this is just where it all starts ...

msra.exe (remote assistance) refuses to connect - for non-admins

Last week one of our admins in a remote location came across an odd issue. They were not able to send a remote assistance request (msra.exe /offerra <pcname>) to an employee that needed some help. They tried other computers and everything was working. They tried it again with a different account that has admin permissions on the target (first) machine and that worked too.

Our helpdesk checked all the permissions but was not able to find any faults. A coworker of mine checked everything again but also was not able to find any configuration issues. Everything looked like it was supposed to.

[SCCM] SMS Agent Host (ccmexec) hangs on Windows 10 1903/1909 – no updates/software are being installed

Update 18.02.2020: I have gotten some new information that suggests that you might be able to solve this issue not only by enabling the Windows Defender Antivirus service on the client, but also by disabling the Endpoint Protection feature on the SCCM server instead. But since I do not have access to our SCCM server (as stated below) I cannot test this approach myself. Feel free to leave a comment below if this actually works too.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in all things SCCM. I have not had any kind of training and I have no access to our local SCCM server at all, not even read-only access. Everything I know is self-taught from bits and pieces I have picked up here and there. A huge jigsaw puzzle with lots of holes to fill – not to mention all the pieces I have dropped under the table by now.

Our resident SCCM guy has been working on deploying Windows 10 1909 to our clients for a couple of weeks now and after overcoming an issue (with my help) that prematurely killed the task sequence (a story for another time) he finally managed to deploy a system that satisfied the requirements I had set.

But even before that, he had accidentally deployed the “1909 Insider Preview” package to a total of seven machines. In addition to those, we had of course manually upgraded a handful machines to 1909 to test it out or to fix other random issues with Windows 10 clients here and there.

Right after the accidental deployment of the Insider Preview version of 1909 we noticed that the SCCM Software Center was in English, and not our usual German locale. A repair installation of the SCCM Client fixed that issue.

[Hardware] Fujitsu Esprimo Q958 will not power down with USB device connected

A couple of months ago, around August-September I believe, we got a new model of Fujitsu Mini-PCs – the Esprimo Q958. We had already been using the Q957 without any troubles for a while so we did not expect to face any problems with this new iteration either. Besides a newer CPU generation (Core i5 8^th Gen compared to Core i5 7^th Gen) nothing had really changed, we thought.

But soon after deploying a number of those new Fujitsu Esprimo Q958 machines to our users we got weird reports of machines not fully powering down when shutting down Windows.

The machines would simply stay powered on when you pressed the “Shut down” button in Windows. The machines would keep running, with power management disabled, and thus the CPU would soon get warmer and warmer, making the fan turn on to 100%, which in turn resulted in a lot of noise thanks to the very small fan.