Windows PowerShell Quick Reference

WMI Reference

The Windows Management Instrumentation facilities in Windows offer thousands of classes that provide information of interest to administrators. This appendix lists the subcategories categories covered by WMI, as well as 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.

WMI Class Categories and Subcategories
Category	Subcategory
Computer ystem 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

Selected WMI Classes, and Their Uses
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 system.
Win32_CDROMDrive	Represents a CD-ROM drive on a Windows computer system. Be aware that the name ...