Windows PowerShell™ 2 For Dummies®

Chapter 18. Mission Control: All Systems Go

In This Chapter

• Making sure you have enough drive space

• Translating System.IO.DriveInfo to Windows Management Infrastructure

• Keeping track of Windows services

• Scanning your event logs for problems

• Using Windows Management Infrastructure to query event logs

Although it's fun to gain knowledge of how to display stuff onscreen and do tricks like counting to 100 by using a for loop, in reality, you're probably reading this book for one of two reasons. The first one is that you're truly interested in discovering what Windows PowerShell is all about and know that the For Dummies series helps you get there faster. The other highly likely possibility is that your boss told you two days ago that he needs you to automate some task by using Windows PowerShell, and you're using this book as a crash course.

From this chapter forward, I focus on bringing together everything that I've talked about so far and applying it to real-world scenarios. (Hey, you never know; I might already have the script you're looking for.) In this chapter, I cover some scripts that you can use to make sure your systems are ready to go.

Monitoring Drive Space

Even with cheap storage readily available everywhere, your computer or your servers always run out of disk space at the worst time possible. What you need is a script that can query the amount of drive (disk) space you have and let you know when that amount passes a certain threshold. Your script can display a pop-up window or ...