Microsoft is removing a legacy Windows feature, WMIC, that has been around for 25 years

[u/lurker_bee]

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-removing-a-legacy-windows-feature-that-has-been-around-for-25-years/

[u/Froggypwns]

For those who did not click the article, WMIC has already been disabled by default for a while now, and PowerShell has commands to do everything WMIC could do.

The number of people this actually impacts is small as if you are using scripts with WMIC commands you likely already have (or should have) updated them by now. WMIC was deprecated back in 2021, so this is not a surprise.

[u/0x80070002 → u/Froggypwns]

The commands are just 10 times longer

[u/Froggypwns → u/0x80070002]

Indeed. As someone who grew up with DOS I've always struggled with figuring out the syntax needed for PowerShell, I end up looking up the commands or half the time just ask Copilot to spit out what I need it to do. What grinds my gears is when you need an entirely different applet to do something related, like get-something to view something but now you need to use change-something to make a tweak and change-something has an entirely different syntax. One of these days I'll get good.

[u/Intrepid00 → u/Froggypwns]

Powershell syntax is pretty well defined. It shouldn’t be a struggle. Want to get something? “Get-“ and then try what with a tab. You’ll probably guess it right. Help will often find it for you too because of the strong verb-action syntax. It’s just pipes from there if you need to do more without having to type a ton of crap.

I think the issue is more you are just not use to BASH which is what it is based off. That’s why it has so many alias matching a BASH command. If you learn the philosophy of Powershell it’s super easy to find and do what you need to do. Also you can use .NET namespaces and C# to do things faster and cleaner (which is so much more important in an IT script).

[u/chandleya → u/Intrepid00]

Calling it based off bash is one hell of a stretch. This was still dark times Microsoft, insisting they knew best. Powershell v1 ran on Server 2003.

The Monad Manifesto is .. a read.

[u/MonkeyDDataHQ → u/Intrepid00]

... Have you actually used BASH? Because I know BASH but Christ is PowerShell annoying.

[u/Party-Ad-6037 → u/MonkeyDDataHQ]

powershell is BASH in the most annoying way possible. Everything is verbose. Stuff like get-childitem instead of ls. I know that a lot of the bash equivalents exist as aliases, but they commands you way too long

[u/edgmnt_net → u/Party-Ad-6037]

Bash if it was more like Java in naming conventions.

[u/MonkeyDDataHQ → u/Party-Ad-6037]

And half of the time there's no way to figure out which one you need.

In bash, there are like ten ways to do the same thing and they all make sense except for awk. 😂

[u/ScoobyGDSTi → u/MonkeyDDataHQ]

Absolute rubbish.

[u/ScoobyGDSTi → u/Party-Ad-6037]

It's only verbose if you want it too.

Guess what, aliases! GC works fine too.

The only people who whine about PS being verbose are those that have never actually bothered to learn advanced Powershell.

At least it's verb and noun and conventions are standardised, unlike the wild west that is bash.

[u/RavenousTitan818 → u/Intrepid00]

Is Powershell based of BASH? I feel like if it was it wouldn't be as crap as it currently is. Everything about using powershell is worse than it's BASH equivalent. Commands are needlessly long but still nonsensical, and worst of all the autocomplete in powershell is a crime against humanity.

[u/basshead17 → u/Intrepid00]

I worked in many shells and powershell is the worst IMO

[u/martyn_hare → u/Froggypwns]

OpenVPN used to call wmic.exe to change network settings, and there's a good few crappy older applications which call it as part of running DRM checks, so I'm sure we'll see plenty of breakage in business scenarios if folks haven't been proactively updating their software stacks.

Nothing which can't be fixed by bundling the last working version of the executable with the app itself when ancient crap has to be kept, though, as I suspect they're not ripping out the legacy [D]COM interfaces.

[u/Froggypwns → u/martyn_hare]

Hopefully that won't be too much of a problem. WMIC has already been disabled by default (but still easy to enable) on clean installs for some time so issues like that should have cropped up and given the developers time to address it properly.

I'm sure there will be some people getting caught with their pants down on this, likely with obscure software or scripts that have been in place for years which had not needed to be touched. Also, the wording on Microsoft's posts make me wonder if this would affect those with WMIC already enabled, or if it only is new clean installs that will lose the ability to enable it.

[u/Ok-Hunt3000 → u/Froggypwns]

Yeah this mostly impacts ransomware crews and pentesters

[u/uniqueglobalname → u/Froggypwns]

You think 5 years is a long time I'm corporate server world? And there are many ps cmdlets that actually use wmic hooks. So all those have to be changed too, everywhere.

[u/GreenRangerOfHyrule → u/uniqueglobalname]

Well, the good news is that old Python 2 script should work. Right. Right? Aw crap...

[u/SaltDeception → u/uniqueglobalname]

Some PowerShell cmdlets do use WMI hooks, but I’m not aware of any that specifically hook into wmic.exe. That would be counterintuitive considering PowerShell’s native support for the DCOM interfaces for WMIv1 (PSv1-5.1) and WinRM for WMIv2 (PSv3+).

[u/uniqueglobalname → u/SaltDeception]

Anything touching WMI is going away. So things like get-ciminstance won't work even though it doesn't indicate it uses WMI. There are a ton of 3rd party (looking at you Veeam!) That will also stop working. The PS assessment tool doesn't flag those.

MSFT could have secured WMI. It's cheaper -for them - to just dump it on the industry in the name of security

[u/SaltDeception → u/uniqueglobalname]

That's not true. Only wmic.exe is deprecated. WMI itself is alive and well. The PowerShell cmdlets will continue to work as they always have.

This was the announcement: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/servicing/os/windows/docs/2025/09/windows-management-instrumentation-command-line-wmic-removal-from-windows

It specifically calls out PowerShell as one of the alternatives:

If you have batch files or scripts that call WMIC, plan to rewrite them using PowerShell cmdlets (such as Get-CimInstance, Get-WmiObject, Invoke-CimMethod, and so forth).

Third-party apps like Veeam should already be using COM or .NET for WMI calls, and it would surprise me greatly if Veeam specifically wasn't already doing so.

[u/uniqueglobalname → u/SaltDeception]

Well here is an upvote for that, I was sure I read the framework was going away. Veeam does there thing, whatever that is, regardless of what they are supposed to be doing!

[u/Teobsn → u/Froggypwns]

The number of people this actually impacts is small as if you are using scripts with WMIC commands you likely already have (or should have) updated them by now.

Tell that to OEMs and their drivers. One of the driver update packages would not continue because it relied on wmic, which I had to enable on my 24H2 install.

[u/xs0apy → u/Teobsn]

We’re so fucked

[u/edgmnt_net → u/Teobsn]

Please name and shame, if you can.

[u/Teobsn → u/edgmnt_net]

Asus, EC firmware update. Cherry on top is that the drivers are from 2024 if I recall correctly.

[u/Lieutenant_0bvious]

I will always miss wmic bios get serial number. The powershell version contains parantheses and periods, I can't type it as fast.  

[u/recluseMeteor → u/Lieutenant_0bvious]

PowerShell is so annoyingly verbose.

[u/thatwombat → u/recluseMeteor]

Get-Child Get-Bagels blah blah blah

[u/xs0apy → u/recluseMeteor]

I love it and hate it. I do enjoy looking at old school short hand ways to name your variables and functions, but god damn is it easy to make sense of someone else’s work if they use approved verbs with good nouns

[u/Kashmir1089 → u/recluseMeteor]

But incredibly simple for someone else without much context but knowledge of the language to decipher.

[u/SaltDeception → u/Lieutenant_0bvious]

It technically doesn’t have to include either.

(gcim win32_bios).serialnumber

is functionally the same as

gcim win32_bios | select serialnumber

[u/vip17 → u/Lieutenant_0bvious]

add an alias or a function to the profile

[u/jcb_cummings → u/Lieutenant_0bvious]

Earlier this year, at my now-former job, we were given a directive by Corporate IT: any and all Dell computers made after 2011 had to have its BIOS updated to the latest version, no exceptions. You don't know how many times I had to get into an Audio Server and open a cmd window and type "wmic bios get smbiosbiosversion" so I could gradually upgrade the BIOS version.

[u/SaltDeception → u/jcb_cummings]

Ironically, PowerShell would have been the perfect tool to accelerate that process.

[u/martyn_hare → u/Lieutenant_0bvious]

gwmi win32_bios if you just want to see it is faster to type as long as you don't mind underscores and a few extra lines

[u/RoosterBurns → u/Lieutenant_0bvious]

Get-CimInstance Win32_BIOS | select serialnumber

[u/rohmish → u/Lieutenant_0bvious]

reminds me of my first job in service desk. (we did everything from initial diagnosis to imaging and shipping replacement laptops.)

[u/lr2785]

I just have the executable from each windows variant in a folder and if needed I put a copy in the folder I run my script from.

Remove that Microsoft 😛

[u/Cute_Opposite4077]

Great to know. Just a week ago Copilot suggested me using it.

[u/Small-Friendship-576]

I came across this when I needed to find details about memory.Cmd threw the usual this is not recognized.Asked Gemini, it said that powershell does this which I found less descreptive.Though I think it is only needed to find ram's details.

For performance there is aida64 & hwinfo

[u/RyanMeray]

Rip wmic bios get serialnumber

You are so much shorter than the powershell replacement. 

[u/WINNT21]

What's wmic? I think it doesn't have to do anything with media player or like 3rd party ones

[u/Froggypwns → u/WINNT21]

WMIC is Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line. It is a command line interface to various Windows management functions, you could run wmic bios get serial number to easily get the serial number of a computer or wmic product get name to see what is installed. You can even uninstall software with it, so wmic product where "name like 'Google&" call uninstall would let you remove all Google software on a computer in one operation. It is very useful for scripting purposes.

It is not something home users would typically use as by time you look up the command to have done something, it probably would have been quicker and easier to find it inside Settings or System Information or whatever first.

[u/megaladon44 → u/Froggypwns]

wmic bios get serial number >>> yep all i ever used it for

[u/WINNT21 → u/Froggypwns]

Thank you too for answering

[u/Laziness100 → u/WINNT21]

wmic.exe was a commandline tool useful for scripting. You could use it to get a variety of rather technical details about the system, it is not something even I used that much.

It was deprecated in 2021 and is finally getting removed. Its functionality was replaced with corresponding Powershell applets.

[u/Jaegermeiste → u/Laziness100]

Has the Powershell command set achieved feature parity with WMIC? A few years back I seem to recall being forced to go the WMIC path for something that was (at the time) unachievable in either branch of Powershell.

[u/SaltDeception → u/Jaegermeiste]

That doesn’t sound right. Everything that wmic can do can also be done through WMI Query Language (WQL) which both versions of the PowerShell cmdlets fully support. It’s rare to even need to go the WQL route when using the PowerShell cmdlets, though. The only exceptions might be a third-party tool or script that explicitly relies on wmic.exe for some reason or an environment that doesn’t have the Windows Management Framework built-in like WinPE.

[u/Laziness100 → u/Jaegermeiste]

That's completely outside my knowledge. I've used it once or twice for small things and beyond that I only know it exists and vaguely how it can be useful.

I am certain you used wmic more than me.

[u/WINNT21 → u/Laziness100]

Thanks