Charlie Russel's Blog

I run as a limited user during my normal work, but I always keep one or more Admin windows open. These are logged in to my Domain Administrator account, running “As Administrator”. And I make sure I can tell that I’m running in that window by setting the colour scheme with a nice, dark red, background. Hard […]

As usual, a minor glitch in my workflow has me mucking around with my $profile. It all started because I normally run Word, Excel, and other Office applications from the command line (as I do many non-MS applications.) To do this, I have functions and aliases in my $profile. These let me start Word, for […]

A copy of the profile described here is at: Charlie_Profile Probably one of the first scripts any new Windows PowerShell user writes is a custom profile. Your PowerShell profile ($profile in PowerShell speak), is run every time you open a PowerShell window, and it allows you to do a lot of different things to set […]

Windows 10’s support for high DPI displays is much better than previous iterations of Windows, but there are still some times it gets a bit confused. One such problem occurs when you have multiple high DPI displays or two displays of different sizes. If you move PowerShell console windows between displays or log back in […]

I know I owe you more on creating a lab with PowerShell, and I’ll get to that in a few days. But having just set up a new domain controller running Server 2016 Core, I thought I’d include a couple of tricks I worked through to make your life a little easier if you choose […]

If you routinely have to log into a separate domain, it can be a nuisance to always have to run Get-Credential. Plus writing scripts with a -Credential parameter is a nuisance because if you call Get-Credential in the script, it will always prompt you.   I run a separate lab network here, with an Active […]

The path on many modern computers gets to be so long that reading it is a nuisance. Worse, from within Windows PowerShell, there isn’t a built in equivalent to the old cmd “path” command. Yet all the information we need is there, it’s just not where we might expect it. The actual executable path for a […]

My standard environment expects to have several drive mappings wherever I’m logged in to my network. Even when I’m running on a computer that isn’t joined to the domain. To facilitate that, I have a simple “mapdrives.cmd” file that has the necessary net use commands in it to map them.  Then my default PowerShell $profile […]

If any of you have ever created a file in the PowerShell ISE and then wondered why it doesn’t look right when you open it in some other editor, or try to run it, you’ve just run into a "feature" that I wish were not the default–New files are saved as Unicode files. There’s no […]