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The WMI service can report plenty of details about the computer hardware. Typically, each type of hardware is represented by its own WMI class. It's not easy to find out the names of such hardware classes, though.
Since all hardware classes descend from the same root WMI class (CIM_LogicalDevice), you can use this root class to find all hardware:
Get-WmiObject -Class CIM_LogicalDevice | Out-GridView
This will return a basic hardware inventory. But you can do even more. With a little extra code, you get a list of hardware class names used by WMI:
Get-WmiObject -Class CIM_LogicalDevice | Select-Object -Property __Class, Description | Sort-Object -Property __Class -Unique | Out-GridView
You can now use any of these class names to query for a particular type of hardware and find out hardware details:
PS> Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_SoundDevice Manufacturer Name Status StatusInfo ------------ ---- ------ ---------- Cirrus Logic, Inc. Cirrus Logic CS4... OK 3 Intel(R) Corpora... Intel(R) Display... OK 3
