The Scottish PowerShell User Group was officially born today! After spending some time reading about all the user groups in the US and in England I thought it was about time we got the same coverage here in Scotland.

As an off / on user of PowerShell since 2011, I’ve found myself living in the command line more and more and loving it. If you’ve read my bio you’ll know I started out on the command line so coming back feels like coming home.

Back in February, Microsoft released version 5.5 of the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET). This new release gave us official Windows 10 support. But we waited a long time for that support. Windows 10 was available to the masses in July 2015.

But Microsoft has suggested that this new EMET is not necessary for everyone:

EMET was released in 2009 as a standalone tool to help enterprises better protect their Windows clients by providing an interface to manage built-in Windows security mitigations while also providing additional features meant to disrupt known attack vectors used by prevalent malware. Since that time, we have made substantial improvements to the security of the browser and the core OS. With Windows 10 we have implemented many features and mitigations that can make EMET unnecessary on devices running Windows 10.

I was recently reminded that my WSUS server is no longer available on the network. The Windows 8.1 tablet couldn’t find it and as a result couldn’t update to Windows 10. This is how I reset WSUS settings on the tablet and used Windows Update for the future.

Removing WSUS settings is easy. You have two options to do so using the Registry or using PowerShell. They both achieve the same thing.

If you’re used to renaming files at the command prompt you might be surprised to discover that to rename files with PowerShell requires a few more keystrokes.

To rename files with PowerShell we need to use a scriptblock to construct the new filename:

# Change the extensions from .bak to .backup
Get-Item '*.bak' |
    Rename-Item -Newname { $_.name -replace '.bak','.backup' }

This will change each file with the extension bak to the extension backup.

There are tools such as Solarwinds V2V that convert from one virtual disk format to another. However I wanted to see if it was possible to convert disk formats with PowerShell. You can do it. With Microsoft tools. But unfortunately not directly.

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter is Microsoft’s version of the VMware Virtual Machine Converter. However Microsoft’s tool will not allow you to convert VMware Workstation virtual machines directly and instead forces you to convert the hard disk in PowerShell and setup the new virtual machine in Hyper-V directly and attach the newly converted virtual hard disk.

In their Surface Pro 3 October firmware update Microsoft have provided support for the new Surface Pro 4 Type Cover. Many people are ditching their Surface Pro 3 type covers in favour of the new one released with Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 last month. But if you are outside of the US, beware.

The new type cover, according to much internet chatter, is a major upgrade from the old Surface Pro 3 cover providing a much more solid experience with both keyboard and trackpad. It also includes a fingerprint sensor that should work well with Microsoft Hello but will be, according to the promo video, be restricted to the US only. Makes little sense but they do use the awesome Thunderstruck by AC/DC in their promo video so I will forgive them for the time being until the Redmond madness subsides.

If you have a Surface 3 you will be receiving a new firmware update from today to help improve the stability of mobile broadband:

The following update will be listed as “System Firmware Update – 9/18/2015” when you view your update history. Surface Modem Firmware Update (v16.50.17.0) improves mobile broadband network stability (for Surface 3 (AT&T 4G LTE) and Surface 3 (4G LTE) in North America (non-AT&T)). Surface Modem Firmware Update (v1521.04.10.0) improves mobile broadband network stability (for Surface 3 (Y!mobile 4G LTE) and Surface 3 (4G LTE) in Europe.

As I tweeted about yesterday, Microsoft have released a new firmware update for the Surface Pro 3 which improves power usage when an SD card is being used.

The following update will be listed as “System Firmware Update – 9/15/2015” or “System Hardware Update – 9/15/2015” when you view your update history. USB 3.0 Card Reader driver update (v10.0.10240.31217) improves the system power usage when an SD card is inserted.

I came across an interesting script on Reddit /r/PowerShell recently. It was an answer to a request for a remote disk clean script that could run across a network. Looking at the code I decided the script could do with a little tidy up and rewrite.

If you look at the original code you will find it is environment specific. Some of it has poor design and does not inspire confidence:

If you’ve downloaded your Windows 10 ISO, you need to boot from it to do a clean install. In this post I show you how to create a Windows 10 bootable USB flash drive for UEFI. The instructions equally apply to Windows 8.1, 8, 7 or even Vista but not XP as it does not allow creating UEFI boot disks.

What do you need before you start?

Before you start make sure you have the following: