Getting Screen Resolution with WMI and PowerShell

Getting the screen resolution with PowerShell is quite simple:

param( [string]$strComputer = "." )
$displays= Get-WmiObject `
-class "Win32_DisplayConfiguration" `
-computername $strComputer

foreach ($display in $displays) {
$obj = New-Object psObject
$obj  Add-Member NoteProperty DeviceName $display.DeviceName
$obj  Add-Member NoteProperty PelsWidth $display.PelsWidth
$obj  Add-Member NoteProperty PelsHeight $display.PelsHeight
$obj  Add-Member NoteProperty BitsPerPel $display.BitsPerPel
$obj  Add-Member NoteProperty DisplayFrequency $display.DisplayFrequency
Write-Output $obj
}

Setting the resolution is not so simple. There are a few ways to do this, none of them completely native to PowerShell. You can pass parameters to a compiled executable like this one listed on CodeProject or Qres (Thanks Hal for the links). If warranted, and ambition wasn't an issue, you could write inline C#. Check out Lee Holmes' Invoke-Inline for a wrapper for this.

Enjoy!