Sometimes you may stumble across URLs like this one:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=135173
These are just "pointers" to the real web address. In PowerShell 3.0, the new cmdlet Invoke-WebRequest can resolve these URLs and return the real address that it points to:
$URLRaw = 'http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=135173'
(Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $URLRaw -MaximumRedirection 0 -ErrorActionIgnore).Headers.Location
