Use PowerShell to Install the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) on Windows 10 version 1809

My computer recently updated to Windows 10 version 1809 and as with all previous major updates of Windows 10, this wipes out the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT). However, unlike previous versions, Microsoft has now made RSAT available via Features on Demand and while you’re supposed to be able to install them from the GUI, they never showed up as being an option for me. That’s not really a problem though since they can now be installed via PowerShell....

October 3, 2018 · 3 min · 570 words · Mike F. Robbins

Convert, Resize, and Optimize VHD and VHDX files with PowerShell

I recently received an email from someone who attended one of my presentations asking if I had a blog article on using PowerShell to compact and optimize VHD files. Since I didn’t have a blog article on that subject, I decided to create one. The process itself is fairly simple. The examples shown in this blog article are being run on a Windows 10 computer which has Hyper-V enabled on it....

March 23, 2017 · 3 min · 496 words · Mike F. Robbins

Solving DSC Problems on Windows 10 & Writing PowerShell Code that writes PowerShell Code for you

I recently ran into a problem with DSC on Windows 10 when trying to create MOF files with DSC configurations that work on other operating systems. An error is generated when the friendly name for a DSC resource contains a dash and that friendly name is specified as a dependency for another resource. I know that only certain characters are allowed in the name that’s specified for DependsOn and I’ve run into similar problems with things such as IP addresses due to the dot or period, but the dash works in other operating systems at least with the production preview of PowerShell version 5, but not with the version of PowerShell version 5 that ships with Windows 10:...

November 5, 2015 · 7 min · 1459 words · Mike F. Robbins

#PowerShell: DelayedAutoStart Property added to the Win32_Service WMI Class in Windows 10 RTM

I recently discovered that Windows 10 adds a DelayedAutoStart property to the Win32_Service WMI Class: Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Service -Filter "Name = 'MapsBroker'" | Format-List -Property * I’ve verified that this property does not exist on prior operating systems such as Windows 8.1 even when they’re updated to the production preview version of PowerShell version 5. I had written a Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog article on how to query the registry of remote machines to Exclude Delayed Start Services when Checking Status with PowerShell that shows how to retrieve the necessary information to accomplish this task on other OS’s, but it’s nice to see that Microsoft has finally made this information easier to retrieve....

September 4, 2015 · 1 min · 211 words · Mike F. Robbins

Remove App Packages from Windows 10 Enterprise Edition

So you’ve installed Windows 10 enterprise edition only to find applications that you would consider to be consumer type apps such as Bing Finance, News, and Sports which is not what you would normally expect to find in an enterprise edition operating system version: You can obtain a list of these app packages for the current user with the Get-AppxPackage PowerShell cmdlet. I’ve sorted the list of app packages by name in the following results:...

August 20, 2015 · 3 min · 549 words · Mike F. Robbins