Scripting Blog

A place to learn about PowerShell and share stories of automation

How Can I Change the Description for a Computer?

Hey, Scripting Guy! When I use Windows Explorer to connect to a remote computer, I can see a description of that computer in the Details pane. How can I change the description for a computer?-- GF Hey, GF. Just to make sure everyone is clear what we’re talking about, we are not talking about the Description attribute in Active Directory; ...

How Can I Tell if the Screen Saver is Active?

Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I tell if the screen saver is active and, if so, how long it has been running?-- MS Hey, MS. Interesting question; we don’t think we’ve ever been asked that before. And at first it had us stumped; after all, there aren’t any WMI classes or COM objects for managing the screen saver, and we didn’t know of ...

How Can I Get Just the User Name When Using the Win32_ComputerSystem Class?

  Hey, Scripting Guy! I’m using the Win32_ComputerSystem class to get the name of the logged-on user. The name comes back formatted like this: Domain\Name. How can I extract just the user name?-- KW Hey, KW. As our much-beloved and highly-respected editor reminded us the other day, instead of spending all our time telling people how ...

How Can I Create a Shortcut in My Network Places?

Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I create a shortcut in My Network Places?-- KP Hey, KP. You’ll have to excuse us if we sound a little out of breath; we’ve been running around like crazy looking for a complicated and highly-technical solution to this problem. It was only after we failed miserably in that quest that we began to think about ...

How Can I Change the Screensaver Timeout Value?

Hey, Scripting Guy! Can I use a script to change the timeout value for the screensaver on a computer?-- JN Hey, JN. For some reason, Microsoft’s scripting technologies come up a little short any time you’re talking about Windows settings and components, things like screensavers, wallpaper, the Taskbar, the Start menu, etc. You can use ...