Working with the registry in PowerShell is similar to working with common files on a local disk. The main difference is that in this concept the registry keys are analogous to files, and the registry parameters are the properties of these files.

Display the list of available drives on your computer:

get-psdrive

Note that among the drives (with drive letters assigned) there are special devices available through the Registry provider – HKCU (HKEY_CURRENT_USER) and HKLM (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE). You can browse the registry tree the same way you navigate your drives. HKLM:\ and HKCU:\ are used to access a specific registry hive.

cd HKLM:\
Dir -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

Those, you can access the registry key and their parameters using the same PowerShell cmdlets that you use to manage files and folders.

To refer to registry keys, use cmdlets with xxx-Item:

• Get-Item – get a registry key
• New-Item — create a new registry key
• Remove-Item – delete a registry key

Registry parameters should be considered as properties of the registry key (similar to file/folder properties). The xxx-ItemProperty cmdlets are used to manage registry parameters:

• Get-ItemProperty – get the value of a registry parameter
• Set-ItemProperty – change the value of a registry parameter
• New-ItemProperty – create registry parameter
• Rename-ItemProperty – rename parameter
• Remove-ItemProperty — remove registry parameter

You can navigate to the specific registry key (for example, to the one responsible for the settings of automatic driver updates) using one of two commands:

cd HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DriverSearching
or
Set-Location -Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DriverSearching

Get a Registry Parameter Value via PowerShell

Please note that the parameters stored in the registry key are not nested objects, but a property of a specific registry key. Those any registry key can have any number of parameters.

List the contents of the current registry key using the command:

dir

Or

Get-ChildItem

The command has displayed information about the nested registry keys and their properties. But didn’t display information about the SearchOrderConfig parameter, which is a property of the current key.

Use the Get-Item cmdlet to get the parameters of the registry key:

Get-Item .
Or
Get-Item –Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DriverSearching

As you can see, DriverSearching key has only one parameter – SearchOrderConfig with a value of 1.

To get the value of a registry key parameter, use the Get-ItemProperty cmdlet.

$DriverUpdate = Get-ItemProperty –Path ‘HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DriverSearching’
$DriverUpdate.SearchOrderConfig