Month: January 2014

When you assign something to a variable, you can enclose the expression in braces. This will also output the data. Have a look: $a = Get-Service ($a...

There are multiple ways how you can ping computers. Here is a simple approach that uses the traditional ping.exe but can be easily integrated into...

To catch a user’s attention, your script can easily play WAV sound files. Here is a simple function: function Play-Alarm { $path =...

There is a tiny .NET function called GetHostByName() that is vastly useful. It will look up a host name and return its current IP address:...

Ever needed a new local administrator account for testing purposes? Provided you are already Administrator, and you opened a PowerShell with full...

Microsoft Excel is an example of a program that is not easy to launch directly: the path to Excel may be different, depending on Office version and...

Any file you download from the Internet or receive via email get marked by Windows as potentially unsafe. If the file contains executables or...

To exclude results that have empty properties, you can easily use Where-Object. For example, when you run Get-Hotfix, and you only want to see...

PowerShell 4.0 (final version as found in Windows 8.1) has Foreach and Where built directly into arrays. This is a geek stuff, so there is no...

If you'd like to open a script in the ISE editor, one quick way is using the command "ise". For example, to open your profile script...

Beginning in PowerShell 3.0, when you press and hold ALT and then select something, you get a block selection. If you make this selection as narrow...

In a previous tip we used quser.exe to find the currently logged-on user on the local machine. Here is now a function that also allows us to find...

There is a helpful console application called quser.exe which will tell you who is logged on to a machine. The executable returns plain text, but...

Whenever someone logs on with invalid credentials, there will be a log entry in the security log. Here is a function that can read these events from...

To change the current desktop wallpaper and make this change effective immediately, PowerShell can tap into the windows API calls. Here is a...

In a previous tip you learned how systeminfo.exe can compose a rich system profile. systeminfo.exe has built-in remoting capabilities, so provided...

There is a little known trick that you can use to block-prepend or block-remove characters in the ISE editor. This feature was introduced in...