There are always new things to discover in Powershell, no matter what your current level knowledge is. And the things you are going to learn will make of you both a better Windows User and a better Windows asdministrator. Take me for instance. Some days ago I was on Twitter and talking with some of my fellows, and one of them (@p0w3rsh3ll) told me about a new cmdlet: Show-ControlPanelItem "Windows Update". My first thought was "hey, what is that?" and immediately went to test it. I was positively impressed by this new-cmdlet that has been introduced in Powershell V3 (so with Windows 7).
There are two cmdlets whose noun is ControlPanelItem and they are:
PS C:\> Get-Command -noun controlpanelitem
CommandType Name
----------- ----
Cmdlet Get-ControlPanelItem
Cmdlet Show-ControlPanelItem
The first one is used to get a list of the items specific to your current system and should return something similar to:
For instance the items present on my test Windows 2012 server are:
- Action Center
- Administrative Tools
- AutoPlay
- Color Management
- Credential Manager
- Date and Time
- Default Programs
- Device Manager
- Devices and Printers
- Display
- Ease of Access Center
- Folder Options
- Fonts
- Internet Options
- iSCSI Initiator
- Keyboard
- Language
- Mouse
- Network and Sharing Center
- Notification Area Icons
- Phone and Modem
- Power Options
- Programs and Features
- Region
- RemoteApp and Desktop Connections
- Sound
- System
- Taskbar
- Text to Speech
- Troubleshooting
- User Accounts
- Windows Firewall
- Windows Update
The last one is the one we have already seen. This is what it does:
PS C:\> Get-ControlPanelItem "windows update" | select Description
Description
-----------
Check for software and driver updates, choose automatic updating settings, or view installed updates.
PS C:\> show-ControlPanelItem "windows update"
You could think of using Show-ControlPanelItem Personalization to present your desktop user the interface to choose a theme, as described by @powerschill on his blog.
The advantage of having such cmdlets is limited by the effort required to learn them by heart. Nonetheless if you are a skilled Windows admin working on a large environment, it could be good for you to learn some/most of them to increase your efficiency on the long term.
I hope you learned something from this post. If it's the case remember to +1. Nice weekend everybody.
