PowerShell

Depending on your reason for using the PowerShell prompt at it, it might be useful to include data such as timestamps in your recorded output, to enable better auditing. This post will walk you through the simple steps needed for customising the PowerShell prompt, including how to show the current date and time. What exactly do I mean by the PowerShell prompt and what does the typical prompt look like by default? Well let me dial it back to default and show you: ...

Here is my quick and easy way to raise the privilage level of a Windows Batch script; allowing you to run your code at an administrator level. This is not a new question and has been asked many times on StackOverflow forums. The best answer I was able to find was the following from dbenham: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1894967/how-to-request-administrator-access-inside-a-batch-file/10052222#10052222 That being said there are many ways to skin this cat, so I came up with my own method, all be it derivative. The main difference in the following code is that you will always get a UAC prompt in my variant of the code, even if you are currently running it as an account that is a member of the local administrators group: ...

Error Correcting Code (ECC) RAM is a variation of coputer memory which helps to ilimintate data curruption or ‘bit rot’, but it is not always imediately apparent if your system memory is running in ECC mode; here is a quick guide on how to check if your system memory is running in ECC mode. This guide covers Windows and Linux systems, but please ensure that if you are running either system in a virtual machine configuration that this command is ran on the host machine. ...

Note: WMIC is deprecated as of Windows 11 22H2. For equivalent functionality use Get-WmiObject or Get-CimInstance in PowerShell instead. wmic is not recognized as an internal or external command – I was quite shocked to find that a command I use on a very regular basis was not working on a fresh installation of Windows 10 1909 on my trust old ThinkPad. I don’t want to spend hours trying to find out why this was not correct in my system path, but instead, I fixed it and spent the time sharing how to fix the problem. ...

There might be a number of reasons to want to prevent your windows screensavers and lock-screens from engaging and in some cases (no doubt yours if you have hit this article from a search engine) local policy on the machine preventing you from changing these settings. Powershell lets us work around this problem and prevent the machine from locking or activating a screensaver. Prevent Screensavers and Lock-screens The bulk of the code below has been lifted from this great write up: https://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/prevent-desktop-lock-or-screensaver-with-powershell/ I just took things one step further by adding an infinite loop. My version of this code will run indefinitely. ...

I once faced a rather tedious task that involved recursively modifying a number of shortcut paths stored across a convoluted folder structure. There was approximately 100 shortcuts which needed part of their path modifying. The answer: Create a****PowerShell script. The following code utilises regex to check for the existence of a string and modify with the define replacement. It is easily possible to use Read-Host to make this a little bit more interactive, but the purposes of my use-case it was just as simple to modify these variables before running the script. ...

For security purposes, it is possible to control the language mode in a given Powershell session. These language modes can constrict which modules can be loaded during the life of a powershell session. Learn mode about Powershell langeuage modes: About Language Modes – Microsoft Detect the Current Language Mode $sLangMode: $ExecutionContext.SessionState.LanguageMode If ($sLangMode -ne “FullLanguage”){ Write-Host ” !! Unable to run scrit – Powershell Using Wrong Language Mode !! ” } Else{ ...

This is really quick nugget of Powershell for anyone who is struggling to copy and paste into a particular window or dialog box. Perhaps it is a case of a website which prevents text form being sent to a field from the clipboard, or in my case, a windows UAC prompt. If you are following password best practices, your passwords should be long, complex and contain zero dictionary words. Furthermore, you should have a different password for every site and service. So, when a user interface doesn’t allow you to paste a password, life gets that little bit more difficult. ...