One of those annoyances that sometimes happen with the new Network Location in Windows 8.x and Windows 10 is that the network gets mis-identified as Public when it should be Private, or the other way around. Changing this in the GUI is certainly possible, but annoying, so let’s take advantage of the improved Windows PowerShell support in Windows 8.1 (and later) and do it quickly and easily. First, let’s open up an elevated PowerShell window from our limited user session: PSH> Start-Process WindowsPowerShell.exe -verb RunAs Now, in that window, let’s find out what our current network loca ..read more

There are some older applications that require earlier versions of .NET than the version included and enabled by default on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. Normally you can enable the .NET Framework 3.5 (which includes .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0) as a Windows Feature. (Control Panel, Programs and Features, Turn Windows Features on or off.) But in some environments, especially those using SBS and WSUS, you may get an error message: 0x800f0906: “Windows couldn’t connect to the Internet to download necessary files. Make sure that you’re connected to the Internet, and click Retry to try again.” This, of c ..read more

In my ongoing quest to remove dependency on legacy DOS commands, I recently created this script to get a list of all the local and mapped drives on a machine and how much free space each has on it.  This script could be easily extended to display additional information (such as the underlying filesystem type) by simply adding to the output tables. All the information is already captured in the Get-WMIObject call at the beginning, but the fun is in the formatting (and math)  of the tables to provide useful information at a glance. # Filename: GetDrives.ps1 # # A script to get a l ..read more

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 example, by typing “word” on the PowerShell command line along with any filenames I want to open. So far, so good. But I recently started using Office 2013 on some machines, and this broke my functions for those machines. And at least one of them is running the 640-bit version of office. Hmmm ..read more

You can install Office 2010 in an RD Session Host (ie, Terminal Server), if you have a volume license version. (If you’re using MSDN versions for testing, there’s a special key for use in an RD Session Host environment see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983443.) Great, and you can go ahead and use all the various features of Office. Except OneNote, which fails with an error message telling you to install the Desktop Experience Feature since you’re on Windows Server. Well, that’s great, and if you’re on Server 2008 R2, that’s the solution. BUT, if you’re running on Windows Server 2012, there ..read more

For those of you using Windows Azure, we finally have official PowerShell support for managing your Azure subscriptions. With the CTP release of the 1.7 SDK, you can install the Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets. The download is here.   Keep in mind that this is a CTP, and the first version of the cmdlets released,  so there are a few rough edges and missing functionality still. But they are already very usable and a big improvement if you need to manage more than a single image in Windows Azure. As I get time, I’ll be posting more stuff here, but I also recommend you add Michael Wash ..read more

I routinely have to map drives across domain boundaries, or to/from non-domain and domain machines. In the old days, I used NET USE commands, which were OK, but there were some issues. Besides, it’s time to move to away from legacy commands such as NET. PowerShell v3 includes an updated set of PSDrive cmdlets (Get, New, Remove) that have added the ability to create persistent mappings to a drive letter. Plus, unlike NET USE commands, I can pass a single credential to connect to multiple machines, and prompt for the password. Ah, HA. Now that’s useful. Here’s my drive mapping script for connect ..read more

Some of you know I’m a huge fan of Windows MultiPoint Server, and the next release is due out “soon”. I’ve been testing it here and I’m really excited about the new features, especially the built in VDI support for both Win7 and Win8 clients. This will solve issues around power users in business environments where WMS has been limited by the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). With direct support for virtual desktops using VDI, that should be a non-issue. To learn more about Windows MultiPoint Server 2012, check out the official blog post here. To join the public beta, go to the Connect direct ..read more

So, a good friend and fellow MVP asked me for a script to shut down all running virtual machines on a server so she could do cold backups of them. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable request, and my first thought was “Well, this gets really obvious and easy in Windows Server 8” since we have a full set of Hyper-V cmdlets there. But then I sort of remembered doing something like this before, and hunted around and found this old TechNet Wiki article I wrote over a year ago. It wasn’t a full fledged script, but had all the pieces I needed to put together a simple script to stop all the VMs on ..read more

I don’t usually bother to write about Microsoft patches. After all, they happen every month, and we all are in the habit of patching (updating) moderately regularly. However, the update in MS12-020, described in this post, is both serious, and very likely to be a target in the very near future, though there aren’t any known exploits. Yet. First, download and install the patch. That’s the obvious fix. However, if there is some particular reason why you can’t install the patch immediately, then you should configure all clients and servers that have Remote Desktop enabled to require Network Level ..read more