My co-worker was wondering last week whether an old Windows domain user account was still being used by someone. Having managed Windows domain environments at my previous jobs, the first thing I did of course was go to Active Directory and check the LastLogonTimestamp attribute. This attribute is stored in the Active Directory database as a Large Integer so it will need to be converted to a normal date format to make sense of it. …

Below are some simple PowerShell scripts that I find pretty useful in Windows administration:

Note: For the scripts that connect to a remote machine, you will need to run PowerShell as a user with Administrator privileges to that machine.

Aliases:

• Gwmi = Get-WmiObject
• fl = Format-List
• ft = Fomat-Table
• -Comp = -ComputerName

Get a list of installed applications for a specified machine (32-bit OS only).

Gwmi Win32_Product -Comp computer_name | Sort name | ft name, …