Windows 11 25H2’s removal of WMIC and the PowerShell alternative

You probably used it in the past, wmic.exe 🙂 The Command-Line interface for querying WMI information has been removed from Windows 11 25H2 and will not be reintroduced in future versions of Windows. In this blog post, I will highlight what that means and how you can utilize PowerShell as an alternative.

What is WMIC?

“The WMI command-line (WMIC) utility provides a command-line interface for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). WMIC is compatible with existing shells and utility commands. The following information is a general reference guide for WMIC. For more information and guidelines on how to use WMIC, including additional information on aliases, verbs, switches, and commands, see Using Windows Management Instrumentation command-line and WMIC – Take command-line control over WMI.”

Source: WMI command-line (WMIC) utility – Win32 apps | Microsoft Learn

Personal experience

It’s just one of those tools to have in your belt while troubleshooting or finding details about systems. You can obtain the serial number, BIOS level, installed software, updates, and other information just by running a simple command-line tool called wmic.exe. It could output that information in a complete list using “full” or a compact list using “brief” if you only needed one piece of information, which was in the default output list. It could also output data to HTML instead of just displaying it.

Some examples below show how I query the system in brief and full list, as well as the list of installed patches on my machine. (I blurred some of the details 🙂 )

Mitigation guidance

As you can find in the information that Microsoft shared about the removal of Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) from Windows (here), there are options to switch from using wmic.exe to using the PowerShell Get-CimInstance Cmdlet or by using COM, API, .NET, etc.

FAQ

The page also has a Frequently Asked Questions section. I highlighted the most important ones below:

Is WMI being removed from Windows?

No, WMI is not being removed. Only the WMIC command-line tool is being removed. The underlying Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) infrastructure remains a core part of Windows and is unaffected by this removal. You will still be able to use WMI through PowerShell cmdlets, scripts, and other tools. Any script or application using WMI via other means (for example, a PowerShell script that does Get-CimInstance or a C# program using WMI classes) will continue to work normally.

Which Windows versions are affected?

WMIC will be removed starting with Windows 11, version 25H2.

When will the removal happen?

WMIC will be removed after an upgrade to Windows 11, version 25H2 and later.​​​​​​​

I have scripts/tools that use WMIC. What should I do?

You should update your scripts and tools to use PowerShell or another supported method as soon as possible. Anything you did with a WMIC command can be run with PowerShell. For example, the WMIC blog post shows how a typical WMIC query can be replaced with an equivalent PowerShell command using Get-CimInstance. If you have a batch file that calls WMIC, you can rewrite it as a PowerShell script or use PowerShell within the batch file. If your tools are more complex, you might use programming libraries for WMI. for WMI.

Get-WmiObject vs Get-CimInstance

I used Get-WmiObject in previous PowerShell versions, but Get-CimInstance has superseded that since PowerShell v3. However, the basic concept remains the same; you can use classes (such as Win32_Bios, Win32_ComputerSystem, Win32_SoftwareFeature, etc.) to query their information from. In the example above, I used the wmic.exe command-line tool, and below I query the same information using Get-CimInstance and specifying the ClassName:

What about wbemtest.exe?

That will remain in Windows; it’s just the wmic.exe command-line tool that will be removed. Wbemtest.exe, if you don’t know or haven’t used it before, is the GUI for browsing and querying WMI information.

Wrapping up

And that’s the information you might need when switching from wmic.exe to Get-CimInstance, something you will have to do if upgrading to Windows 11 25H2 for your scripts. Have a lovely weekend!