Video Tutorial
OS Architecture (32 or 64 bit) using PowerShell
Today we are going to discuss about 4 ways to find OS architecture using PowerShell and check if it is 32 or 64 BIT operating system:
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Using Environment Variables:
$Envor[System.Environment]First approach I’m going to demonstrate here is using the Environment variables, so
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Using
Get-WMIObjectorGet-CIMInstancecmdletsPowerShell can also be used to query this information from WMI or CIM classes like
Win32_OperatingSystem,CIM_OperatingSystem,Win32_Processor
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Using Native CMD commands:
wmicWe can also use native commands in PowerShell like: wmic in the following example
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Using
System.IntPtrtypeFinally, fourth and last approach is using .Net type
System.IntPtr, which is an integer whose size is platform-specific. Either 4 or 8.
That means, if we use[System.IntPtr]::Sizeit will then return platform architecture type in Bytes (1 Byte = 8 Bits) so 8 byte is equals to 8*8 = 64 Bits.
If you like this article read more similar articles under ‘N – Ways to’ category
- 4 ways to send output to NULL in PowerShell
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Great summary!
I’d just like to point out that $env:PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE and [System.IntPtr]::Size will return x86 and 4 respectively when run in 32-bit context on a 64-bit OS. All other methods will return the expected value even in 32-bit context.
The first method can be made failproof as such:
‘AMD64’ -in $env:PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE,$env:PROCESSOR_ARCHITEW6432
This will return $True for a 64-bit OS.
I’ve been mislead before in context of SCCM Task Sequences, which run PowerShell code in 32-bit by default.
Thanks a lot, I’ll update the article accordingly!