PowerShell 3 quick switch to PowerShell 2

PowerShell 3 improves on PowerShell 2 by adding almost 500 new cmdlets built-in.  One drawback unfortunately, is cmdlets or scripts written for version 2 do not always work as expected.

If you need to quickly switch to version 2 while you are in PowerShell 3 type the following.

 PowerShell.exe -version 2  

 
You will see the copyright info change to 2009 and if you type get-host it will display version 2.



To switch back to version 3 you can either  close and re-open PowerShell or simply type in your current session

 PowerShell.exe -version 3  

 

Set PowerShell icon launch to default to run as Administrator

Many commands in PowerShell will not run unless they are run as an administrator.  You can of coarse right click on the taskbar icon and choose the ‘Run as Administrator’ option. But if you prefer to have the icon or shortcut default to run PowerShell as Administrator then you can right click on it once, and choose the ‘Properties’ item.

In the window that pops up, near the bottom right of the window click  the ‘Advanced’ button.

On the next (and last) screen, you will see a checkbox with ‘Run as administrator’. make sure that checkbox is selected, click ‘OK’, then ‘OK’ on the main Properties window to exit .

From now on out, when you click the PowerShell icon, it will run as administrator and you should see the Administrator prefix displayed in the PowerShell title bar.

Get memory configuration of all vm's on hyper-v server and output totext file

Two line powershell script that gets memory configuration of all vm’s and outputs to text file.  Change path and name of vmmemory.txt to suit your needs.

Works on Server 2012 with powershell 3

 Get-VM | Get-VMMemory | out-file -filepath C:\VMMemory.txt  
 C:\VMMemory.txt   

Get all vm’s on a hyper-v server and output to text file

This two line PowerShell script will get all vm’s on a hyper-v server and output to text file. Change path and name of vmrunning.txt to suit your needs.

Works on Server 2012 with powershell 3

 Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.State -eq ‘Running’} | out-file -filepath C:VMrunning.txt  
 C:VMrunning.txt  

Powershell 3 combo installer

These combo installers will update PowerShell to Version 3 on either Windows 7 x86 or Windows 7 x64 / Server 2008 R2

The installer runs silently and installs both the dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64.exe  and either the Windows6.1-KB2506143-x86.msu or Windows6.1-KB2506143-x64.msu files. When the script  completes a pop-up prompting for a reboot will be displayed.




After re-booting and launching powershell type get-host to display the version number.