Managing Control Panel Items using Powershell v3.

Hi,

First of all “Happy New Year” everyone. New year is started and this is a good time to start learning  new things. I think the best things to learn for me is a “Powershell Version 3”.

Yesterday i installed a “Windows Server 2012 Standard Edition with GUI” in a virtual machine. As i am planning to cover new cmdlets on “Powershell Version"3” and then we can end up by writing scripts.

“I like  it”

The interface of “Windows Server 2012 Standard Edition”  is pretty neat and clean. I like GUI interface of the server 2012 to be it feel very sober and attractive”

My current “Windows 2012 Server” machine is a standalone and not added to Active Directory yet.

To check the version of Powershell on “Windows 2012 server” Click on Powershell icon to open powershell console and type the cmdlet “$PSVersionTable”

$PSVersionTable

You can see in below image that the Powershell version 3.0 is installed.

In few of my old scripts when i want to open any control panel item i used to call the .CPL extensions. for example if i want to open “Network Connection” then i used to call “NCPA.cpl” in my script.

But in Powershell V3 they actually created a 2 new cmdlets to open control panel items and believe me they are going to be very handy.

The first cmdlet is “Get-ControlPanelItem”

Get-ControlPanelItem

when you run “Get-ControlPanelItem” in Powershell console this gives  list of Names of  all items those are in control panel.

Now we know how many and which items we have in control panel. To open those items we need second cmdlet which “Show-ControlPanelItem”

Show-ControlPanelItem

lets open few control panel items.

Show-ControlPanelItem -Name "Folder Options"

and lets open Display Properties.

Show-ControlPanelItem -Name "Display"

Cool isn't?

Thanks

Aman Dhally