Managing Windows Features (Part 1)

by Aug 14, 2018

Windows 10 comes with a vast number of features, and only a subset is installed. Manually, you would open Control Panel and look at the Windows Feature list. Experienced Administrators may also use the dism.exe command-line tool.

With PowerShell, you can view the state of Windows features via Get-WindowsOptionalFeature. When you specify –Online, the cmdlet returns the currently available features and their states.

Using Where-Object, you could now easily filter out results, and for example only show a list of not-yet-installed features:

# list all Windows features and their state
Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online | Out-GridView

# list only available features that are not yet installed
Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online | 
    Where-Object State -eq Disabled |
    Out-GridView

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