2.5 Summary

This chapter continues to use the scripting techniques revealed in Understanding WMI Scripting, Chapters 4, 5, and 6, and applied to some real-world scenarios. For instance, we have seen how to manage the environment variables, the Operating System processes, and the printer devices. These scripting management techniques combine knowledge of the WMI scripting API, asynchronous scripting techniques (i.e., the script sample managing processes), and WMI event techniques (i.e., the script watching the free disk space and file size). From the simple information retrieval up to the complete utility to configure a network adapter from the command line, we really discovered the WMI capabilities. It is important to note that the WMI capabilities do not only cover system customization; they also cover system monitoring.

Now that we know the possibilities of the Win32 providers, let's see what we can do with the other WMI providers available in Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Window Server 2003. We use the same learning techniques and structure. However, based on the WMI provider purpose, the scripts perform different types of tasks in the system customization and monitoring areas.