I got called by a client to add a printer to their Windows 11 laptop. They’d had the unit for a couple weeks already, and everything else was humming along just fine.
This will be an easy job (shouldn’t have thought that!), I’ve done this numerous times before without ever having any issues!
So I connected remotely to her laptop and got to work.
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In IT we often need to quickly get high-level information about our systems. That’s why I developed this PowerShell script, it grabs comprehensive hardware and software inventory from Windows machines, locally or remotely, in seconds.
This function delivers a treasure trove of system details in a single PSCustomObject:
Hardware Specs: CPU (cores/logical processors), motherboard details, RAM (manufacturer, capacity, DDR type/speed), disks (model, SSD/HDD/NVMe, size/free space), GPUs.
System Essentials: Manufacturer/model/serial, BIOS version, firmware mode (UEFI/Legacy), OS build/install date, last boot time, IP/MAC addresses.
Security Posture: TPM presence/version, Secure Boot status, BitLocker on system drive, Windows Defender (real-time protection), Firewall profiles, TLS support.
Operational Status: Power plan, Windows Update (pending/reboot flags).
I spent some time today experimenting with ways to “debloat” Windows trimming down unnecessary background services that quietly drain performance and slow startup times. While exploring different approaches, I ended up writing a few practical PowerShell scripts to make the process faster, safer, and easier to audit.
Managing Windows services manually through the Services console quickly becomes tedious, especially when you need to repeat tasks across multiple machines. PowerShell solves that problem by offering a simple, repeatable way to inspect, modify, and restore service configurations with structured output that can be logged or shared later.
In this post, I’ll walk through four PowerShell scripts I created to help manage and streamline Windows services effectively. Each script logs results to a CSV file, making it easy to track changes or share insights with others.
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For a while now, I noticed a weird behavior on my PC where I’d see instances of iexplore.exe and ielowutil.exe running when I’d review my Task Manager’s list of processes. I’ve tried to understand where these were coming from as I haven’t used Internet Explorer in a long time.
What perplexed me even more, is I was able to see the same behavior with a client’s PC that I performed a fresh install of Windows on.
So I was looking for a way to identify when the process(es) were initiated and decided on PowerShell because it is baked into Windows so available.
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Have you ever wanted to build a responsive process to a folder’s content?
In my case, I wanted to create a process in which I could dump an image file in a folder and automatically resize the image and save it in 4 different formats (gif, jpg, png, webp).
I’ve previously discussed using ImageMagick to do this, but until now, this still required human intervention as you needed to manually open some automating utility (Excel, Access) and I was hoping for a process that just did it on its own without me needing to do a thing.
Now I did some digging and found mention of creating a Windows Service. This is messy, requires Visual Studio, Advanced coding, Installation Permission, Code Signing, … It will works, but no thank you, not for what should be a simple thing to do (at least in my mind).
That’s when I started digging into PowerShell. It is truly amazing what PowerShell will allow us to do.
A while back I demonstrated how we could use VBScript or VBA to alter a file’s ‘Date Created’ or ‘Date Modified’ properties, refer to:
I was recently helping someone out on Experts Exchange who was asking to do the same through PowerShell and thought I’d share the code here as well in case it could help a few of you out there.
If you’re looking to modify a file’s creation or modification dates, PowerShell makes this task incredibly easy.
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I recently needed to save a base64 image string back as a file on my PC. Yes, I have all the code to do so here, and in demo databases, but I decided to go the PowerShell route as it is simpler for a the one off situation I was in. Don’t get me wrong, it can be done in VBA and I’ve provided the code to do so here already, but PowerShell, as you will see momentarily, makes it much simpler to accomplish.
As such, I thought I’d simply share the code should anyone else need to do so.
The basic concept is:
$base64 = '...'; #base64 string to save as a file $saveAs = '...'; #fully qualified path and filename to save the base64 string as [IO.File]::WriteAllBytes($saveAs, [Convert]::FromBase64String($base64));
a concrete example would be:
I’ve long been looking for a simple way to enable/disable the Airplane Mode on my PC.
Over the years I’ve found lots of post which enable/disable the WiFi adapters and the likes, but don’t actually toggle the Airplane Mode!
Well, I finally figured out a simple PowerShell script to do so.
I’m always amazed at the level of pure stupidity that Microsoft exudes at times!
I know, we all have our moments in the sun, myself included, but Microsoft just seems to manage to outdo themselves.
I’m well aware that in an ideal world, Microsoft wants us all running MS365 and thus we would have all migrated all of our existing Web Browser controls to use the ‘new’ Modern Web Browser control, but that isn’t reality, not even close! The fact of the matter, the legacy Web Browser control is still fully supported and thus why fix something that isn’t broken. Beyond which, many people are simply not running MS365 so they don’t even have access to the Modern Web Browser control at all.
All of this to say, that many a database are still using the ‘Legacy’ Web Browser control, thus IE (Internet Explorer)!
Seems like an simple enough question, right!
Now try to create a routine to answer it!
This was in fact a question I recently came across last week in a forum. For some reason, this was one of those questions I just needed to answer out of personal curiosity. I’ve done so much image manipulating … that I was sure I could quickly provide an answer. So I set off.