Richard Siddaway's Blog

PowerShell v2 is available already in Windows 7 (and shortly in Win 2008 R2). A Release Candidate is now available for Vista\Windows 2008 https://connect.microsoft.com/windowsmanagement/Downloads As explained http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2009/08/14/powershell-2-0-for-windows-vista-and-windows-server-2008-release-candidate.aspx it is a combined packages contain PowerShell v2, WinRM 2.0 and BITS 4.0 All you need except .NET.  You will need .NET 3.5 if you want to use […]

This is an interesting experiment – http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ Enter your search and get results back from bing, yahoo and google.  But you don’t know which is which.  Then choose which you think returned the best results. Interesting results. Technorati Tags: Search Engine Comparisons

The PowerShell team have just posted about obtaining system up time using a .NET class to convert the WMI date format to something thats readable http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2009/08/12/get-systemuptime-and-working-with-the-wmi-date-format.aspx There is a WMI only way of doing this $os = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_OperatingSystem $os.ConvertToDateTime($os.LastBootUpTime) But this gives the date and time the system was last booted.  If you […]

One thing I noticed was that remoting appears to be switched on by default.  I did a clean install to the extent of deleting and resizing the install partition so it shouldn’t have picked up any remnants of previous installs. The execution policy still defaults to restricted. Technorati Tags: Windows 7 RTM,PowerShell,v2

The machine is rebuilt and all applications re-installed.  I said after installing the RC as an upgrade that I felt some of the Vista feel had come across.  This install feels much better – like the beta that impressed me so much at the beginning of the year.  I recommend a clean install for Windows […]

Currently rebuilding the laptop.  Downloaded Windows 7 RTM from TechNet last night and did a complete refresh.  PowerGUI is one of the first installs on any new machine. The latest version installs great.  Notice the opportunity to prevent the association of the editor with PowerShell files has been moved and is much more visible and […]

This isn’t quite finished but there is enough useful stuff to share.  I was wondering what order things are loaded – especially services and found that this information can be found in the registry – only difficulty is reading it. 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 […]

September 16th I will be presenting to the AD User Group: An "Introduction to Powershell"‬‪ ‬‪Windows 2008 R2 brings PowerShell v2 installed by default. It also brings a raft of PowerShell functionality including a provider and cmdlets for Active Directory. This session will introduce PowerShell for those new to it and show you how to […]

We can modify the service startup type by using WMI or with PowerShell v2 we can use set-service.  This has a number of other useful functions. Its just a matter of testing the type we want to change the startup to and applying it to the service.  This becomes another function in my services module. […]

If we need to look at the startup history of a service we can find the information in the event log   001002003004005006 function Get-ServiceStartupHistory {param ([string]$name )  Get-EventLog -LogName System | where {(($_.EventId -eq 7035) -or ($_.EventId -eq 7036)) -and $_.Message -like “The $($name)*”} }   I’ve done this as a function as I’m moving all my service based scripts into a module. Eventually, all my scripts will be in modules Technorati Tags: […]