Tutorials – Herring's Fishbait

November 30, 2020

Simple PowerShell to get a Computer’s Specification

With Black Friday and Christmas fast approaching, I’m getting a lot of requests for people to help with computer upgrades or even whole new PCs.

Normally the first question you need answered is what do they have already, but this can sometimes not be straight-forward to a non-technical person.

Me: “What kind of PC do you have now?”

Them: “Sort of beigey-white? Eggshell maybe?”

We’re mid-pandemic so going round to have a look isn’t an option and my intricate multi-page documents about how to go to get each piece of info (with screenshots!) were still too technical.

So, PowerShell to the rescue.

February 10, 2017February 23, 2017

PowerShell: Tutorial 2, “Teach a Man to Fish” or Working Out The Command You Need

A series of tutorials, or How To Get Started With PowerShell: “It’s Awesome” edition.

The title was originally built around “Teach A Man A Cmdlet and he PowerShells for a day; Teach a Man to Use Get-Command and he PowerShell’s for a lifetime.” But it got more and more clumsy and convoluted so I finally decided that there really was a limit to my own cleverness.

PowerShell really is quite clever though and makes it really easy to work out the cmdlets you want to use for any task. Continue reading “PowerShell: Tutorial 2, “Teach a Man to Fish” or Working Out The Command You Need”

January 13, 2017April 30, 2020

PowerShell: Tutorial 1, Everything is an Object

A series of tutorials, or How To Get Started With PowerShell: “It’s Awesome” edition.

When I thought about what I considered the most important, fundamental thing to learn about PowerShell I went through a couple of options; Piping? The help system and Get-Command? -WhatIf?

All useful things to learn, but for me it has to be how everything in PowerShell is an object. It’s how you can build Really Cool Stuff from lots of simpler parts.