Yesterday I wrote about different ways to check how much charge is left in the laptop battery. After that I explored win32_battery WMI class further and got some more useful information.

How do you know your battery current status, like is it charging properly?, is it running low, it is full with charge, it is partially charged, is the charge is too low?. It is easy to answer this kind of questions if you can interpret batterystatus attribute of Win32_Battery WMI class. Let us see the possible values this attribute can hold and their meaning.

*Above table is copied from MSDN site.

Now let us write a script to check the battery current status.

Function Check-BatteryState {
param($Laptop=$env:computername)
$Bstatus = (Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Battery -ea 0).BatteryStatus
if($Bstatus) {
    switch ($Bstatus)
    {
    1 { "Battery is discharging" }
    2 { "The system has access to AC so no battery is being discharged. However, the battery is not necessarily charging." }
    3 { "Fully Charged" }
    4 { "Low" }
    5 { "Critical" }
    6 { "Charging" }
    7 { "Charging and High" }
    8 { "Charging and Low" }
    9 { "Charging and Critical " }
    10 { "Unknown State" }
    11 { "Partially Charged" }            

    }
}
}

This powershell function helps you to identify current status of laptop battery. Hope this helps..

In this post, I will show you how to pragmatically query battery status in laptops using powershell. It is important to check batter status before performing some critical tasks like patch updates or service pack updates via some automation(s). If the laptop charging drains down in middle of the upgrade, it can corrupt the operating system.

You can use below one liner to check the percentage of charging left in the battery:

(Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Battery).estimatedchargeremaining

Similarly, if you want to how many more minutes this charging comes, you can use below code:

(Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Battery).EstimatedRunTime

Hope this helps and you will have crash free upgrades on laptops.

I always to wanted to make my powershell codes look beautiful in my blog but I didn’t find any tool which can help me in this regard. I used Syntax Highlighter for some days but my blog readers expressed concerns in using the code that I generated using Syntax Highlighter . So I removed it completely and ran my blog with just black and white code for some days.

I am a follower of RaviKanth chagati blog and I liked the way he colorizes his powershell code in posts. I approached him for help and he is kind enough to offer. Surprisingly, the solution is within powershell region and I no need to use any external tools to add color to my code.

I thought of making a post about this so that other bloggers who post about powershell like me can also benefit from this.

So, let us go ahead and see how we can add color to powershell code.

Launch your “Powershell Integrated Scripting Environment” Console which we use for writing powershell code. You quickly launch it by running “powershell_ise” from RUN command.

Once opened, import ISEPACK powershell module and execute the code in ISE by pressing “F5”. Now you will notice “Add-ons” tab in Powershell_ise.

Now paste your working code(or write directly in powershell_ise editor) in editor and press “Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C”(it does nothing but triggering copy-coloredHTML function in isepack module) and this will generate HTML equivalent of the code you have written in powershell ISE and make the HTML code available in clipboard. You can post paste operation anywhere to see the HTML code.

If you like GUI mode, you can do the code generation by triggering copy-coloredHTML function like shown below.

Once the code is available, let us move to content manger ( I use “wordpress”). In HTML portion of new post form, paste the HTML code that you generated and switch to Visual tab to view the preview.

I did above yesterday for 3 posts and output is very nice. You can view them below.

https://techibee.com/powershell/powershell-change-monitor-brightness/1022

https://techibee.com/sysadmins/powershell-minimize-all-windows/1017

https://techibee.com/scripting/powershell-get-cpu-architecture-on-windows-7-computer/1012

Recently I came across a method using which you can control the monitor brightness. This method uses the WMI class named “WMIMonitorBrightnessMethods” which lies under rootwmi. This WMI classes offers various other functions using which you can manage various parameters of monitor brightness

Here is the example code:

function Set-MonitorBrighness {
[CmdletBinding()]
param (
[ValidateRange(0,100)]
[int]$brightness
)            

$mymonitor = Get-WmiObject -Namespace rootwmi -Class WmiMonitorBrightnessMethods
$mymonitor.wmisetbrightness(5,$brightness)
}

Set-MonitorBrighness -brightness 1

This sets the monitor brightness level to 1%. The first parameter of the “wmisetbrightness” function is timeout which defines the time it takes to switch to the brightness one you have set.

Have you ever got a requirement to minimize all windows on the desktop using powershell script? It is helpful when you want to give a pop-up message to user which should draw their immediate attention.

I came across this little tip while exploring shell.application com object. It has other useful functions like undominimizeall, cascade windows, and many other explorer functions.

$shell = New-Object -ComObject "Shell.Application"
$shell.minimizeall()

You can also undo minimize all windows by using below code.

$shell = New-Object -ComObject "Shell.Application"
$shell.undominimizeall()

To see the clear functionality, add some delay between minimizeall() function and undominimizeall() function.

$shell = New-Object -ComObject "Shell.Application"
$shell.MinimizeAll()
start-sleep -Seconds 5
$shell.undominimizeall()

Hope this helps… You can explore more functions of shell.application object by using below code snippet.

New-Object -ComObject "Shell.Application" | gm | select Name, MemberType

I wrote on the similar topic before. My earlier attempt was to determine OS architecture but this time, I am going to talk about querying CPU architecture using powershell code. It is needless to explain the difference between these two things. 🙂

So, below is the code which helps you determine CPU architecture of a computer.

function Get-CPUArchitecture {
if (($ENV:Processor_Architecture -eq "x86" -and (test-path env:PROCESSOR_ARCHITEW6432)) -or ($ENV:Processor_Architecture -eq "AMD64")) {
write-host "Detected 64-bit CPU architecture"
} elseif ($ENV:Processor_Architecture -eq 'x86') {
write-host "Detected 32-bit CPU architecture"
} else {
write-host "Unable to determine CPU architecture"
}
}

Hope this helps…

Are you new to Group policies? Looking for a document to get basics? Well Microsoft has recently released a document which helps beginners to understand basics of GPOs. This document explains various components of GPOs and their usage.

You can download this document from here

Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 are having real good amount of new GPO settings that IT administrators can manage on their Client and server computers. These includes, controlling the USB devices, configuring firewall rules, and many more. One can go through gpedit to get a understanding of all the settings but that is time consuming.

I came across these nice downloads from Microsoft which describes significance of each settings, their options, and the corresponding registry keys if any. Using this sheet you can quickly search for a policy and understand its functionality.

Download these reference guides from MS download center

Happy Learning….

Backup Procedure:

1. Go to Start -> Run and type “%appdata%MicrosoftSticky Notes” and Click “OK”
2. This opens the location of Sticky Notes file, “StickyNotes.snt”, where all the sticky notes data is stored.
3. Just take a copy of this file and save it somewhere safe.

Procedure to Restore:

Restoring Sticky notes is as good as copying back the file that you saved in safe location. Just copy the backed up file to “%appdata%MicrosoftStickyNotes” folder.

Hope this helps.