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In PowerShell 2.0, Set-ItemProperty by default always creates REG_SZ (String) values. PowerShell 3.0 is smarter. When you submit a numeric value,...

Sometimes, you might see interesting information on websites. For example, navigating to http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html will open a...

Let's assume you have a variable with a negative value, and you'd like to make it a positive value. Here's a simple way: Basically, this...

PowerShell can read and write Registry keys and values easily, but there is no a built-in way to check the data type of a given value. To find out...

In a previous tip, we illustrated how you can feed HTML data to Excel in order to create formatted Excel sheets. Today, we'll show you an easy...

When you convert PowerShell results to CSV or HTML output, you may have discovered that some properties don't display correctly. PowerShell...

PowerShell can send data to Excel using CSV files easily. Here's a short script creating a list of running services and opening it in Excel...

Here's a simple way of finding unassigned drive letters: If you just want any unused drive letter, pipe the result to Get-Random. This approach...

PowerShell 3.0 introduces two new operators to bitwise shift. You can use these, for example, to convert GB to MB or KB to GB: -shr 10 basically...

In a previous tip we explained how you can tell PowerShell not to debug certain functions by adding a special attribute: function test {...

Suggestions are little pieces of text that can appear next to a PowerShell error message to better explain what went wrong. Suggestions only work in...

Here's how you can pick a certificate from your certificate store. This line will return certificates that have "Tobias" in the...

Starting with PowerShell 3.0, the certificate provider has become a lot more powerful. It can now easily delete certificates plus their associated...

When you run a console command inside a non-console PowerShell host (like the ISE editor), there will be a flashing window, indicating that the host...

In a previous tip you learned how PowerShell can list all available time zone IDs. Today, we show you how to set the time zone using the utility...

There is a little known utility called tzutil.exe which can both set the current time zone and get all available time zones. Today, let's check...

Microsoft Office has many different versions and exists as a 32-bit and 64-bit edition. Finding the installation path with PowerShell can still be...

Typically, when you set breakpoints in your script and then step through your code using F11 or "Debug/Step Into", the debugger will visit...

In the PowerShell console, you may have noticed "suggestions" that appear with common errors. Suggestions are designed to help you better...

PowerShell logs all errors in $error variable (unless the cmdlet uses -ErrorAction Ignore). $error contains the error records which in turn contain...

As pointed out in a previous tip, PowerShell 3.0 now supports the use of validators for variable assignments. This is a great way of ensuring that a...

Most high-level cmdlets dealing with services have built-in code to wait for state changes. So when you run Restart-Service to restart a service,...

In a previous tip we illustrated how in PowerShell 3.0, you can now use validators to restrict the data that can be assigned to a variable. Here is...