Powershell – Windows Server 2012 GUI went missing after removing Active Directory

The Microsoft Basic Display Adapter, as the name implies, is meant to be basic. This means you are locked to a resolution of 1024x768 and have minimal desktop eye candy.

To resolve this issue, install display drivers provided by the video card manufacturer. AMD's Catalyst 12.8 or later "for Windows 8" has been working perfectly for me on Server 2012.

Or, you can just ignore the issue. If you're going to install Server Core into production (eventually) anyway, then it doesn't really matter much whether you have display drivers or not.

(I don't know about your audio; mine works fine...)

Powershell (not the ISE) leverages the "Console Host," which is a slightly more modern update to the ancient MS-DOS command prompt. The Console Host was Microsoft's way of keeping the Command Prompt compatible with modern versions of Windows, but also still compatible with old console apps.

When you launch Powershell.exe, csrss.exe spawns a child process called conhost.exe. This behavior is identical to when you launch Cmd.exe.

But since they had to maintain compatibility with old console apps, they couldn't change the look and feel too much, nor could they go changing and breaking a bunch of internal interfaces.

I'm not going to say that it's impossible, but it is harder than one would think.

There's nothing in (Get-Host).UI.RawUI. There's nothing in the System.Console .NET class.

You could change the font face and size in the registry by doing something like this:

(edit: underscores not slashes)

Set-Location HKCU:\Console
New-Item '.\%SystemRoot%_System32_WindowsPowerShell_v1.0_powershell.exe'
Set-Location '.\%SystemRoot%_System32_WindowsPowerShell_v1.0_powershell.exe'

New-ItemProperty . FaceName -type STRING -value "Lucida Console"
New-ItemProperty . FontFamily -type DWORD -value 0x00000036
New-ItemProperty . FontSize -type DWORD -value 0x000c0000
New-ItemProperty . FontWeight -type DWORD -value 0x00000190

There are also a bunch of exports in kernel32.dll that change the font:

typedef struct _CONSOLE_FONT {

   DWORD index;

   COORD dim;

} CONSOLE_FONT; 

BOOL WINAPI SetConsoleFont(HANDLE hOutput, DWORD fontIndex);
BOOL WINAPI GetConsoleFontInfo(HANDLE hOutput, BOOL bMaximize, DWORD numFonts, CONSOLE_FONT* info);
DWORD WINAPI GetNumberOfConsoleFonts();
BOOL WINAPI SetConsoleIcon(HICON hIcon);