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.

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.

Sending Wake-on-LAN packets from a Wi-Fi device or "why you should disable Windows 10 quick boot"

Recently one of my co-workers signed up for doing home office a few days every week. Being the exemplary user he should be (working in IT and all) he tried waking up his office machine using his notebook a few days before he was going to do home office. And against all expectations ... nothing happened.

Office 2016 toast notifications after upgrading to Windows 10 1709

After the upgrade of 70 computers from Windows 10 1607 to Windows 10 1709 discussed in the previous post people started complaining about a lack of toast notifications coming from Outlook 2016.

And indeed. When checking the Settings app under "System -> Notifications & Actions" there were entries for all kinds of applications but no trace of Outlook 2016 anywhere. And checking a Windows 10 1607 machine showed that it had been there before the upgrade. So something broke with the upgrade to 1709, again ...

Upgrading Windows 10 Enterprise 1607 to 1709 - And why useful error messages are important

As mentioned in previous posts we have about 3500 client computers and at this point somewhere around 600 of them are running Windows 10 Enterprise 1607 (the Anniversary Edition). Updates are handled through SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) and so are the Windows 10 feature upgrades (going to be).

We had already run some test with the Creators Update 1703 but only rolled that out to a handful of machines, mostly internally in the IT department. So last Friday it was finally time to test the deployment of the Fall Creators Update 1709 to about 70 clients all at the same time. We wanted to see what kind of impact this would have on the network. The 70 machines were located on two different floors and supplied by two different switches. I will not go into detail about the numbers here but one switch showed a throughput of about 500Mbit/s for around 20 minutes supplying 40 or so machines. (Later I did another upgrade and 1 machine caused a peak network usage of 180Mbit/s for about 2 minutes.) But this is not the point of this post.

[BUG] Windows 10 default user profile oddity - Free folders for everyone

Remember my post from July 2017 about how the default user profile under Windows 10 was writeable by any user (no admin rights required) if you had 1607 installed at any point in time?

 

Well, here we are again with a new oddity.

 

[BUG] Windows 10 default user profile is potentially writable by everyone

This is the story how I found out (by proxy) that the default user profile in Windows 10 is potentially writable by any user and the odyssey of trying to get this security bug fixed ... and failing to do so in the end.

For those who do not want to read the full story I posted a TL;DR version at the bottom. ;)


2017-05-19 19:55 - I got contacted by a friend who asked me for my input on an issue he (or rather his company) was having for weeks and months already and had not been able to figure out yet. Even Microsoft Germany, who they contacted themselves about this issue on 2017-03-28, did not have a solution for them.

Some background: His company is selling servers and support for them. So far, there are over 1.800 of their servers with over 100.000 connected clients and over 1.000.000 users out there and they had a problem with newly deployed Windows 10 systems they were not able to figure out.