Configure Your Windows 11 Machines Like An IT Professional

Every new rollout on Windows 11 brings a bunch of new settings to explore.

If you’re an IT professional like me, you might be tempted to configure your system using Group Policy, especially if you’re working at scale. Or you might be tweaking your box by editing a bunch of registry settings.

What if I told you there’s another approach you can take?

This approach is easily scalable, can be hooked into Azure for centralized reporting, including applying the configuration if you want, and still gives the end-user the freedom to modify the settings.

In this blog post, we’ll review a couple of PowerShell modules that are available or awaiting release as alpha on the PowerShell Gallery or Microsoft’s Artifact Registry (MAR).

Microsoft.Windows.Setting.Accessibility

The Microsoft.Windows.Setting.Accessibility module allows you to configure the accessibility settings. You can see these settings if you go to Settings → Accessibility.

Figure 1 — Accessibility settings

Inside the module, there are 10 resources available, allowing you to configure each setting programmatically.

Imagine you want to set the following audio setting:

Figure 2 — Mono audio setting

Then, yes, it is easy to toggle the switch on in the settings menu, but we are IT professionals. We do things differently.

If you have the module available on your local machine, you can open a PowerShell terminal window and execute the following:

$commandInput = @{
    Name         = 'Audio'
    ModuleName   = 'Microsoft.Windows.Setting.Accessibility'
    Method       = 'Set'
    Property = @{
        EnableMonoAudio = $true
        RestartService  = $true
    }
}

Invoke-DscResource @commandInput

To discover more available resources you want to configure in such a way, run the following: