Powershell

In the previous tip we explained how to manage Lenovo BIOS settings from PowerShell. Typically, there are single settings that need to be managed....

There is unfortunately no standardized way of managing BIOS settings for computer vendors. Each vendor employs proprietary approaches. For Lenovo...

Most cmdlets and functions are part of PowerShell modules. If you’d like to explore where exactly these commands come from, here is an easy...

If you’d like to lock the current workstation from within PowerShell, you can take advantage of the fact that PowerShell can run executables....

PowerShell can run inside WinPE environments. If you’d like to detect whether your PowerShell script runs inside a WinPE environment, you can...

Starting with PowerShell 5, cmdlets like Extract-Archive can extract the content of ZIP files to disk. However, you can always extract only the...

PowerShell comes with new cmdlets like Extract-Archive that can extract (all) files from a ZIP file container. However, there is no way to just list...

Beginning in PowerShell 5, you can assign a validator to a variable. The validator can take a regular expression, and once you assign new values to...

PowerShell by default “forgets” most settings on restart. If you’d like to “keep” settings, you use a profile script....

The PowerShell console (powershell.exe, pwsh.exe) offers extensive completion support. When you enter a command and then add a space and a hyphen,...

In the previous example we showed the code required to read registry values remotely from another machine using the old-fashioned DCOM protocol. If...

If you cannot use PowerShell remoting, and you need to read registry values from another system via DCOM, here is some example code you might want...

When you enable ScriptBlockLogging, PowerShell logs all PowerShell code that is executed on your machine. Even if it is disabled, any...

Reading and writing values to the HKEY_LOCAL_USER hive in the registry is easy, because this hive is the same for all users. How would you read or...

In Windows 10, unlike in Windows Server, you cannot use the Get-WindowsFeature and Add-WindowsFeature cmdlets to manage Windows features. However,...

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...

PowerShell by default does not support the native cmd.exe command such as „dir“. Instead, it uses historic aliases called...

Invoke-WebRequest can retrieve HTML info from web pages, and regular expressions can then scrape information from these pages. Here is some code...

When you use double-quoted strings, you can expand variables inside of them like this: PS C:\> "Windir: $env:windir" Windir: C:\Windows...

When you run winver.exe, you can easily retrieve the full Windows build number. Reading the build number from PowerShell is not as obvious. There is...

If you’d like to know whether a specific device is attached to your computer, you can use WMI to dump the names of all plug&play devices:...

PSGraph is an awesome free PowerShell library that you can use to visualize relationships. Before you can use PSGraph, you need to install its...

In the previous tip we started to look at how cmdlets from the ActiveDirectory module (part of the free RSAT tools) can filter results, and looked...