Inventorying the installed software

In addition to inventorying a system's hardware, it is often necessary to inventory the installed software. There are two primary methods to query the installed software: using the Microsoft Installer, and the Uninstall registry key. These two locations generally return the same information, however as we will see there are different uses for each.

How to do it...

Complete the following to review the installed software:

1. Get installed features.

   Get-WindowsFeature | Where-Object Install`State -EQ "Installed" 

2. Return software inventory via MSI.

   Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Product 

3. Open event viewer and review the system event logs. Note the multiple Event ID 1035 messages as shown in the following screenshot:

   

4. Return inventory via a registry.

   $HKLM = 2147483650
   (([wmiclass]"root\default:stdregprov").EnumKey($HKLM, `
   "Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall")).sNames  

5. Return installed patches.

   Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_QuickFixEngineering 

How it works...

We...