Have you ever had problems connecting to a network and gotten one of those dialog boxes that offers to repair it?  Mostly the networking just works but every now again one of the 10,000 moving parts required to make networking function gets misaligned and I get this dialog box.  I always try and it has never worked for me.  This is one of those “triumph of hope over experience” moments for me.

Last Thursday I was in a big meeting and could connect to the network,.  I really needed the network so I decided, I’ll give it a go.  What was different this time is that I’m running Windows 7 and it has the Win 7 Troubleshooting Center.  I gave it  a try.  To my utter surprise and delight – it worked.  I was so delighted that I stopped the meeting and told everyone about it.  I cannot tell you how pleased this made me and how optimistic I am about Win 7.  You’ll see a bunch of marketing materials explaining all the “marquee features” and those are all awesome.  What makes ME so excited about Win 7 is the thousands upon thousands of things that now “just work”.   You are not going to read about them in a brochure but they are the things that are going to make to step back and say, “wow – that is a really good OS”.

Now this is the PowerShell blog not the Win7 fanboy blog so there has to be some tie-in to PowerShell right?  And you are correct – there is.  The Win 7 Troubleshooting Center is all built upon PowerShell.  In fact, if you want to have some fun go to a Win 7 box and type this into PowerShell:

ps> dir $env:windir\diagnostics *.ps*1 -Recurse

You’ll find some pretty cool stuff in those scripts.

Kudos to the Win7 Diagnostics team for really moving the ball forward!

Enjoy!

Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at:    http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at:  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx