PowerShell v2 Tracking Down Registry Tweaks

Heres an example of how I took an action and tracked down the underlying information used to configuration the user interface. To help automate some of our internal processes I was tasked with finding ways to make PowerShell a component of our provisioning toolkit. In this case I wanted to change the default display for the control panel View by preference from Large icons to Small icons.

I could have spent a ton of time tracking down the key on Google, but, I prefer to use Sysinternals tools instead. First, I fired up Process Monitor with the Control Panel open. Once Process Monitor was capturing I simply clicked the Include Process from Window icon

and highlighted the inner window of the Control Panel.  After making my change I saw a few entries pop up in Process Explorer.  Flipping back I saw the path I needed to focus on.

Using this path I simply opened regedit, tweaked the values to test.

Once I was sure this was my key, I wrote the following function in PowerShell to handle it for my script. Note that this is profile dependent (HKCU).

function Set-ControlPanelViewToSmallIcons
{
 Write-Output "$(Write-TimeStamp): Attempting to set Control Panel View to `"Small Icons`"."
 if((Get-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:SoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerControlPanel" -Name AllItemsIconView).AllItemsIconView -eq 1)
 {
  Write-Output "$(Write-TimeStamp): Control Panel View already set to `"Small Icons`"."
 }
 else
 {
  Write-Output "$(Write-TimeStamp): Control Panel View not set to `"Small Icons`". Attempting to set now."
  Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:SoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerControlPanel" -Name AllItemsIconView -Value 1

  Write-Output "$(Write-TimeStamp): Validating Control Panel View has been set to `"Small Icons`"."
  if((Get-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:SoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerControlPanel" -Name AllItemsIconView).AllItemsIconView -eq 1)
  {
   Write-Output "$(Write-TimeStamp): Control Panel View has been updated to `"Small Icons`"."
  }
  else
  {
   Write-Error "$(Write-Error): Control Panel View was not set to `"Small Icons`". Cancelling processing."
  }
 }
}

In the example above, $(Write-Error) is just a wrapper function for Get-Date -Format yyyyMMddHHmmss. 

Together Sysinternals tools and PowerShell can go a long way.  This is a very simple illustration of an other wise tedious and time-consuming process reduced to about a 3 minute task thanks to the right tools.

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