WMIC is being removed from newer Windows installations, and I'm curious how much trouble this has caused for other administrators. I've already found a replacement for one piece of software, but many custom scripts still depend on WMIC and are failing. Which commands or workflows have been the hardest to migrate, and what replacements are you using?
5 Answers
Most of our old inventory commands have straightforward PowerShell equivalents, but mapped-drive information is less convenient. `wmic netuse get name,username` showed both the mapped drive and the account used to map it, which was very helpful for troubleshooting. I still haven’t found an equally simple replacement that provides the username details in one command.
The command I miss most is `wmic bios get serialnumber`. It was simple, memorable, and useful during PC refreshes. The PowerShell replacement is ` (Get-CimInstance Win32_BIOS).SerialNumber`, although I still occasionally type the old command out of habit.
Nothing broke for us because we started replacing WMIC usage years ago. For inventory work, Get-CimInstance against classes like Win32_BIOS and Win32_ComputerSystem covers most of the common queries. We kept the same output field names so our CSV exports and reporting jobs didn’t need major changes. Be sure to test under the same account and 32-bit or 64-bit context as the scheduled task, since some apparent WMIC failures are actually permissions or execution-context problems.
A small compatibility wrapper helped too. We kept it around until every script and downstream consumer had moved to the newer queries.
The bigger inconvenience is that WMIC was one compact tool with many easy-to-remember commands. Now the replacements are spread across several PowerShell cmdlets, so even when the functionality exists, it can take longer to remember the exact syntax.
WMIC’s removal shouldn’t have been a surprise. It had been marked deprecated for years, was removed from newer installations, and later required manual installation. We migrated our scripts as soon as the warnings became serious rather than treating this as a one-for-one command replacement. Deprecated tools and APIs are a normal part of maintaining administrative automation.
Same here. The muscle memory is the annoying part, especially after using those commands for more than a decade.