powertips

Maybe you never noticed but when you delete folders that were shared on the network, the share may be left behind. To locate shares that have no...

PowerShell can convert objects into HTML using ConvertTo-HTML. By adding a bit of custom formatting, your reports can be colorful and cool. The...

Regular expressions are a powerful but somewhat complex mechanism to match and find patterns in text files. However, it is not always necessary to...

Whenever you do something twice, automate it! This applies to native commands as well. PowerShell can help you call a native command repetitively....

Often, information needed to comprehensively profile a computer comes from a number of sources. A great way to meld these different bits of...

WMI not only provides rich information, it also supplies methods that you can call to take action. In the next example, you can forcefully shut down...

WMI provides a wealth of information as long as you know the name of the WMI class that represents the entity you are seeking. Fortunately,...

WMI is a fantastic source of information! Best of all, it works locally as well as remotely. For example, the next line gives you details about your...

As you have discovered in a previous tip, reading Eventlog entries is fairly simple using WMI and Win32_NTLogEvent: Get-WmiObject Win32_NTLogEvent...

Event logs are a great source of information. The only problem is that they tend to be overwhelming. Try using WMI and the Win32_NTLogEvent class to...

Reading text files is easy using the Get-Content cmdlet: $text = Get-Content $env:windirwindowsupdate.log However, Get-Content reads the file line...

To convert the ASCII value to a character, use type casting like this: [char]65 To do the opposite and convert a character to its ascii value, use...

Get-Acl is a convenient Cmdlet to expose NTFS file and folder settings. For example, to get a list of ownerships for a folder content, do this: Dir...

You need to sort a text file, maybe a list of servers or names? Here is how: $file = $homeserverlist.txtGet-Content $file | Sort-Object |...

Windows Media Player can be accessed using COM, and WMP in turn gives you access to your entire media. Using GetByName(), you can directly access...

Windows Media Player (WMP) gives you access to all of your media stored on your computer. PowerShell can access this information through COM using...

Often, in your document folders a lot of files exist, and most of the time they are not really organized. With the help of a little PowerShell...

By using the -passThru parameter, you can tell Compare-Object to return the actual objects you compared. Let's say you are looking for new...

Whenever you'd like to compare long-time results or compare data on different machines, you want to use persisted result sets. Persisted result...

Compare-Object can help you monitor folder content and find changes. To monitor, first create an initial snapshot. At a later time, you can then...

PowerShell makes it easy to compare results and find only things that changed. For example, you may want to list only processes that started after a...

If you'd like to find Users in your Active Directory and bulk-change certain properties, you may not need 3rd party extensions. Here is an...

If you ever wanted to find out which folder in your profile consumes the most space (or want to check user profiles to make sure people do not...

Arrays are by default read/write so you cannot lock down arrays and make them read-only. To create a read-only array, you can "upgrade" it...