After more than two decades, Microsoft is finally pulling the plug on WMIC, the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line tool that has been part of Windows since the XP era.
The change is coming with the latest Windows 11 preview update, KB5120998, and will affect both Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2. Microsoft had already marked WMIC as deprecated in 2024, but existing installations could still use it. That is about to change.
The important detail is that Microsoft isn’t removing WMI itself. The underlying Windows Management Instrumentation system remains fully supported. What disappears is wmic.exe, the command-line utility that administrators and power users used to retrieve hardware information, BIOS details, system data, and other information through scripts. For most people, nothing will happen. Most Windows users have probably never typed a WMIC command in their lives.
IT administrators and anyone maintaining older scripts should pay more attention. Batch files, PowerShell scripts, startup tasks, monitoring tools, inventory systems, and deployment scripts that directly call WMIC can stop working once the executable disappears.
Microsoft’s recommended replacement is PowerShell, which can access the same WMI information while offering considerably more flexibility for modern automation. WMIC’s retirement is therefore less about breaking Windows and more about finally cleaning out some very old plumbing. The tool has been obsolete for years, but plenty of legacy scripts have continued quietly depending on it.