I'm looking to remotely disable then re-enable a NIC ... possible?

Question

My organization is having quite a few issues now that we're finally rid of XP. We think we've narrowed it down to the default setting of Win 7 NIC cards Power Management, specifically the "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power"
checkbox being enabled (checked). Example below:
We've had hundreds of complaints of disconnects and issues re-connecting when people leave their computer at lunchtime or an extended break, and on a few dozen of those specific people we have tried disabling this (manually) and they report the issue has
stopped for them. We'd like to test this on a few dozen more people, but they're at remote locations and we'd have to do it remotely. Making the actual change isn't a problem, it's a specific registry key located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002bE10318}\
- the problem is the NIC needs to be disabled and re-enabled after changing the key to make it stick, otherwise it seems to revert back to a default (which is that box checked on).
Does anyone know of a way to disable and then re-enable a NIC on a remote machine via PowerShell? We have full remote access to these machines, so we can copy scripts to them or invoke-command if need be.
Thanks in advance.
[email protected]

Answer 1

If running PowerShell V3, you can take advantage of disconnected remote sessions to continue running code even if the session has been disconnected (and in theory should work if the NIC drops).
Something like this should work:
#Create the session option; Drop is important so the command execution continues on after the disconnect
$Option = New-PSSessionOption -OutputBufferingMode Drop
$Session = New-PSSession -ComputerName 'client1' -SessionOption $Option
Invoke-Command -Session $Session -ScriptBlock {
#Registry code work goes here
$NetAdapter = Get-WMIObject Win32_NetworkAdapter -filter "Name='Intel(R) 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection'"
$NetAdapter.Disable()
$NetAdapter.Enable()
#This may not be needed since the connection will drop anyways
Disconnect-PSSession $Session
#Wait a bit and see if the system comes up as the commands should still be running remotely
Note: The clients need to be running V3 for this to work.
Boe Prox
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