Pinging computers is a frequently needed task. The PowerShell cmdlets such as Test-Connection can do pings but do not have a timeout limit, so when you try and ping offline systems, it may take a long time to get a result.
WMI can ping with timeouts. Here is how:
$ComputerName = 'microsoft.com' $TimeoutMillisec = 1000 Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_PingStatus -Filter "Address='$ComputerName' and timeout=$TimeoutMillisec" | Select-Object -Property Address, StatusCode
A status code of 0 indicates success. Any other code indicates a failure.
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