“Copilot, I get an error when I run this code”
“An easy fix for this would be to remove the WMIC component from Windows”
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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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A rare good move that sounds like a bad one (from what I'm seeing in the article)
This was announced quite a while ago, and get-ciminstance does basically the same.
Real question is how does this affect MDT? Will it still pull that information, will vendors supply it?
Yeah, and I bet not a single admin has ever used this feature. It's obscure, barely works, arguably causes more problems than it solves, and there are many other tools that fulfill the same use case, better.
This is one of those things I learned about because it wss in a textbook then never used again. The two or three times I asked about using as part of a solution at work, I got either a confused look or a "good joke" reaction.
That was close to ten years ago. This is the first I'm hearing about them since then.
Quick and easy way to get serialnumber. Im sure there's other ways too, but i habent had to find them out because wmic bios get serialnumber.
Literally used it a few weeks ago. Probably once every few months when i get a computer that is only reporting hostname.
There's alternative commands available , but it's odd that Microsoft would remove a well-known one just in general. It's one thing for people to change their habits, but what about legacy scripts?
After all, this is the same Microsoft that prevents you from naming a file "con" because it could break old scripts
Linking effing reddit. Are you not aware of today's internet? Waste of a post if you ask me.
I have used it in scripts to build inventories of my employer's computer system
It grabbed to following info:
- Manufacturer
- Model
- Serial Number
- RAM amount
- Storage size
- Used space of storage
- OS version
- BIOS version
I piped that data into an HTML report that we used as a dashboard
Used to use it pretty regularly. Especially for automating service tag retrieval. My main qualm with it was inconsistent use between manufacturers. Otherwise it was a nicely handy tool.
WMIC allows an amazing amount of control for admins that know what they are doing. One of my favorite uses was back when I worked helpdesk, users would exit Lync and be unreachable, well WMIC can allow an admin to open that app back up in the users session and then they are suddenly reachable again.
Some people use the old psexec, others have been using WMIC since before powershell even existed.
I used it a handful of times for some different things, but given that powershell can interface with the WMI namespace, it basically became superfluous.
never even heard of wmic. looked it up and it's just been superseded by a new tool. this is barely even news, but neowin had to title the article like it's a big deal.
I used to use it very frequently. "wmic bios" was a quick way to get the serial number of a pc, or "wmic os get lastbootuptime" for that data ("no, you didn't reboot your PC when I asked you to").
I'm kind of surprised they didn't just make it an alias and interface to powershell get-ciminstance.