Dell Bios Module

I have previously written about hardware vendors shipping PowerShell hardware related modules. I just ran across another one – this time a BIOS module from Dell, which comes with a rather cool provider! You can get the module itself from Dell's Mobile Solution site.

The provider is used to configure the SMBIOS on Dell's 'BizClient' systems. It was originally build for PowerShell V3, but I've installed and am using it on Windows 8.1 and PowerShell V5 November Preview.  Before you can use the module you need to install Dells HAPI driver (provided in module download noted above. See the release notes for specifics, but installing the driver is painless - done by unzipping the files, then running HAPIInstall.exe. I created a sub folder and extracted the files into the sub folder before running the installation, which looks like this:

This screen shot comes from my Latitude E6520 laptop. Once the driver has installed, you can then access and use the module. Typing Get-BiosSettings, brings up a sweet grid view containing all the current bios settings, something like this:

The provider itself is also pretty cool – you can use the CD/LS commands to view various items as well as set their values. For example, you could change the Bios Setup Admin password, or whether numlock should be turned on at boot, etc. As with most providers , you can easily retrieve information from Dell's provider that would be helpful for troubleshooting as well as for reporting. You can also use the provider to change BIOS settings. Using the provider is easy and looks like this:

This module should work on most of the Dell range, although I have not tested it extensively.  One neat looking feature is the ability to remove the bios setup password.

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