Chapter 7. WMI Reference

The Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) facilities in Windows offer thousands of classes that provide information of interest to administrators. Table 7-1 lists the categories and subcategories covered by WMI and can be used to get a general idea of the scope of WMI classes. Table 7-2 provides a selected subset of the most useful WMI classes. For more information about a category, search the official WMI documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com.

Table 7-1. WMI class categories and subcategories

Category

Subcategory

Computer system hardware

Cooling device, input device, mass storage, motherboard, controller and port, networking device, power, printing, telephony, video, and monitor

Operating system

COM, desktop, drivers, filesystem, job objects, memory and page files, multimedia audio/visual, networking, operating system events, operating system settings, processes, registry, scheduler jobs, security, services, shares, Start menu, storage, users, Windows NT event log, Windows product activation

WMI Service Management

WMI configuration, WMI management

General

Installed applications, performance counter, security descriptor

Table 7-2. Selected WMI classes

Class

Description

Win32_BaseBoard

Represents a baseboard, which is also known as a motherboard or system board.

Win32_BIOS

Represents the attributes of the computer system’s basic input/output services (BIOS) that are installed on a computer.

Win32_BootConfiguration

Represents the boot configuration of a Windows ...

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