Can't display help about_ topics

PowerShell Help
1

Hi, I’m pretty new to PowerShell, and I’m trying to access the conceptual about_ topics. I have two machines running Windows 10 - one is 1511 and the other is 1607; neither of them show anywhere near the number of about_ files that exist on the machine. for example, on my laptop:

PS C:\> get-help about_*

Name                              Category  Module                    Synopsis
----                              --------  ------                    --------
about_BeforeEach_AfterEach        HelpFile                            performed at the beginning and end of every It...
about_Mocking                     HelpFile                            Pester provides a set of Mocking functions mak...
about_Pester                      HelpFile                            Pester is a BDD based test runner for PowerShell.
about_should                      HelpFile                            Provides assertion convenience methods for com...
about_TestDrive                   HelpFile                            A PSDrive for file activity limited to the sco...

I have tried running update-help -force, rebooting, etc with no luck.

When I try to run example 4 in the TechNet article here I get the below output. What am I missing?

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> get-help about_signing

Name                              Category  Module                    Synopsis
----                              --------  ------                    --------
Get-Help                          Cmdlet    Microsoft.PowerShell.Core Displays information about Windows PowerShell commands a...
Out-Printer                       Cmdlet    Microsoft.PowerShell.U... Sends output to a printer.
Get-AuthenticodeSignature         Cmdlet    Microsoft.PowerShell.S... Gets information about the Authenticode signature for a ...
2

condensed into first post

3
What am I missing?

Most of the about_ help topics :slight_smile:

This is a known problem. You can either copy them from a working computer or use this script.

4

Thanks for the info. The really confusing part is that C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\en-US contains what appear to be many of the same files without only a .txt extension instead of .help.txt. When I rename them they work reasonably well. The synopsis doesn’t work, and the formatting is garbage. The text is largely the same, though.