Now I know some people have never been near a command prompt of
any type, and for Windows admins that kind of makes sense, the
product is called Windows after all,
but still, let me show you how easy it is to get into a
PowerShell session and move around.
Okay,
so back in Windows 10, running PowerShell 7 is really no different than
any other application that you've installed in Windows.
I can come here to the little Start icon and find it. Now,
because I've just recently used it, you know,
I have it up here, I can just click it and it will actually run it, it's
not that hard. Close that. I could also come here to the search box and
start typing pwsh. You can see it pops right up.
I can go ahead and open it there. Or, I can do the run box
and do pwsh, and again, it also will run.
So that's all very easy to do. Now, one thing that I tend to do,
though,
and which I don't think I've done on this system, is I'm going to do two things.
One,
I'm going to come back up here and I'm going to pin
this to the Start menu so it's here,
and I'm going to go here and also I want to pin it to the task bar.
That way I also have it down here, and I can get to it whenever I need it.
So now I can come here and I can click it and run.
So, what I want to now here though is I want to show you how
to customize that because I'm betting that is kind of hard
for you to see on the screen.
So we'll come up here to this little menu, and we'll come here to
Properties. Now a lot of these are set by default and most of them
you can keep. I like using the Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V for copy and paste, so
I'm going to go ahead and turn that on. For the font, I'm going to
bump my font up to, let's say 24, make it nice and big,
nice and easy to read, especially on high‑resolution monitors.
That's a nice thing to do these days.
Now for the layout,
I'm going to kind of keep it 120 characters across because lots of
information that we're going to get in PowerShell. And we'll try
the height, I guess I'll leave that at 30. We'll see how that
goes. Now colors, if you want,
you can change the colors. If you wanted to change the
background or the foreground colors,
I'm going to kind of leave mine the dark color.
Eventually I'll make it full screen and it will be a little bit easier to
read. And then the last thing you can do here is there are some other
customizations that you can do for the terminal, but I'm going to leave
those alone. And let's just click OK,
and I'll double‑click up there. So hopefully that
is a little bit easier to read.
Those settings should be maintained, so if I close this and open this up again,
I get the same settings. We'll just kind of maximize the window there.
Now, one thing I want to point out is that there are two ways,
like with everything in Windows, of running
applications. You can run it non‑elevated,
which is what I've done now. I'm logged on as artd, and you can see that he's
just a regular user, and I know that because the title bar just shows me
PowerShell 7. To run in an elevated session, any of the PowerShell 7
shortcuts, there's an option here to Run as Administrator. This will give you
the UAC prompt, so go ahead and say Yes.
Now, this is technically a slightly different shell,
so I'm going to go back here and reset my properties.
Let's set that that way.
Let's make the font 24, and I think that's all I need.
Now, I'm still logged on as artd, I can kind of prove
that. Let's type a whoami command,
So I'm still logged on as art, but notice up here, the
title bar now shows Administrator.
There are some things that you'll be doing in PowerShell that will
require you to run in an elevated session, if you're going to be
manipulating the registry or accessing certain things with PowerShell
remoting, eventually you'll need to be running as administrator. And
the way that you can tell is look for that Administrator keyword up
there in the title bar.
All right, so that is a quick look at configuring PowerShell.
Let's go ahead now, and let me clear the screen, and let's, well, let me
clear the screen the right way by typing cls, and let me show you some ways that you can navigate and work with PowerShell 7.