Ever want to display a balloon tip notification for something in PowerShell? No? Well, it’s cool. Maybe you should try it out!

FYI: If you’ve been seeking to gain some centralized control over PowerShell’s ExecutionPolicy, Microsoft has a downloadable ADM template that will allow you to control the shell via Group Policy. It’s at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2917A564-DBBC-4DA7-82C8-FE08B3EF4E6D&mg_id=10050&displaylang=en.

A few months ago, I wrote an entry about using Powershell to look at recent event logs. Since then, I’ve decided to make a minor improvement. The new function lets you specify the number of event logs to retrieve.

One issue that always seems to come up when using WMI to manage remote machines is being able to communicate with WMI on the remote machine. This is especially an issue when the remote server sits behind a firewall or across a WAN. I got tired of running complex WMI queries only to have them fail because the computer is unavailable. I need a way to validate the computer before carrying out the main part of any script or automation task.

Here’s another fast and furious Powershell tip. Even though Powershell has an alias for DIR, it is not the DIR command you’re used to. It is an alias to Get-ChildItem. This means if you are use to using commands like DIR *.exe /w ,this will fail in Powershell. Fortunately, there is a simple remedy.

PowerShell MVP MoW has made available a very slick WMI Explorer tool. Think Scriptomatic but in PowerShell. In some ways I like it even better than the original Scriptomatic. It is very easy to discover WMI properties and quickly return instances all within one GUI. The tool is a PowerShell script (unsigned) that you run from […]

Ever wonder what Windows PowerShell was “supposed” to be, and how close v1.0 is to the vision? Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/03/19/monad-manifesto-the-origin-of-windows-powershell.aspx, where the product’s architect shares the original “manifesto” document. There are some interesting insights into the differences between administrative scripting and out-and-out software development which are extremely useful to take note of: Administrators tend to […]

I thought this was going to be a fast and furious example, but it took a whole lot longer than I expected. The good news is that I’ve done all the work for you. You’re most welcome.

I love weather and living in central New York we get all kinds. So I decided I needed a thermometer on my desktop. Using PowerGadget’s Out-Gauge cmdlet this is pretty easy to do.