powertips

Let’s start with translating addresses into latitude and longitude coordinates. We assume you read the previous parts to fully understand the...

Last year, Google changed their terms and requires an individual API key now to use their geocode API. Fortunately, there are free alternatives, so...

Sometimes, web requests that work fine in a browser do not seem to work well in PowerShell. For example, when you navigate to...

When using comparison operators, always make sure the relevant part is placed left. That’s because PowerShell looks at the left side of an...

Whenever a user locks his machine, and whenever a user unlocks a machine, Windows emits an event. PowerShell can subscribe to these events and do...

The Windows Update Client maintains its own log of installed updates. Rather than querying the generic system event log, or actively searching for...

Get-Hotfix returns installed hotfixes but really only is a wrapper around the Win32_QuickFixEngineering WMI class. It is not returning all installed...

PowerShell can access the same logic that is used by the Windows Update Client, and query for missing updates: $UpdateSession = New-Object...

Ever wondered why your CPU load is so high at times, or why black windows open up for a split second? Then check your event log for program...

Provided you have Administrator privileges, here is a quick and easy way of dumping all login events. This way you can find out who logged in to a...

Often, URLs redirect to the final URL, so if you’d like to know where a given URL really points to, use a function like this: function...

When you download files from the internet and use PowerShell, you may want to find out how long the download will take. While you can check the size...

Sometimes it would be nice if a script was able to detect a key press without interfering with the script and its inputs. This way, you could add...

In the previous tip we looked at the FileSystemWatcher object and how it can monitor folders for changes. To not miss any changes, however, an...

Here is a chunk of code illustrating how PowerShell can use the FileSystemWatcher to synchronously watch a folder including subfolders for file...

When your company uses an authenticated proxy, PowerShell may not always be able to contact the Internet. You may have to instruct the web proxy to...

Today we are not talking about code but about PowerShell in general. Microsoft has announced that the next release of PowerShell is called...

The Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) used to be an external download that added two important PowerShell modules: ActiveDirectory and...

Windows Indexing indexes most files in your user profile and drives the fast file search in File Explorer. PowerShell can access the same mechanism....

PowerShell comes with a number of looping constructs. These looping constructs cannot stream, so you cannot pipe the results to other cmdlets and...

As you probably know, there are two breeds of PowerShell: Windows PowerShell ships with Windows operating systems and is based on the full .NET...

To adjust an audio volume and mute/unmute the speaker, PowerShell can use C# code and access API functions like this: Add-Type -TypeDefinition...

In the previous tip we explained how you can use web services to safely test passwords and find out whether they have been compromised before....

Complex passwords are not necessarily safe. For example, “P@ssw0rd” is a very complex password, however extremely insecure. That’s...