Updating PowerShell help on Windows “8”

If you are evaluating the new Hyper-V PowerShell cmdlets in the Windows “8” beta – you may have noticed that the help is a bit bare.  Here you can see what you get if you run “get-help” on the Set-VMDvdDrive cmdlet:

Just the parameter names and nothing else.

But there are two important things to know:

1. We do have quite detailed help available – even though this is only a beta release.
2. It is quite easy to get the full help

All you need to do is to open an administrative PowerShell prompt and run “update-help”.  Here you can see the extra details that are available after running this command:

You can also get access to examples after doing this:

Personally, I find that I often look at the examples to remind myself how to use a specific cmdlet.  What makes this a bit pathetic is that half the time I am looking up examples that I wrote myself :)

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 13, 2012
  Thanks so much for this.  After viewing a cmdlet's help I noticed it said "Get-Help cannot find the Help files for this cmdlet on this computer. It is displaying only partial help. -- To download and install Help files for the module that includes this cmdlet, use Update-Help". But when I tried running Update-Help it said that it couldn't find that cmdlet.  The trick as you mentioned was to run the Powershell Console as an Administrator, and then Update-Help worked as expected.  Thanks a bunch!

• Anonymous
  August 12, 2015
  Hi, after migrating my 8.1 with a disabled Hyper-V to Windows 10 I enabled Hyper-V incl. the PowerShell module. Surprisingly enough no help for the Hyper-V cmdlets is available after that update. If you are still behind Hyper-V: may be this is not a specific problem on my installation.