Suppose someone asks you for a list of applications you have installed on
your computer. To get this information, what’s the first thing you would think
to use? Third-party program? Not us, we have PowerShell.
How to Get a List of Installed Software on Your PC
Getting a list of installed software is as simple as using this
straightforward WMI query.
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Product | Select-Object -Property Name
You will probably want to export that to a file though, which is also easy
enough — we’ll send the output using the > symbol and adding the path to a
new text file that we want to create. Make sure that path(C:\List\) is exist in
your C drive or you can select any path
you want.
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_product | Select-Object -Property Name >
C:\List\List_of_Applications.txt
What makes using Power Shell really neat is that if you do this on two
different machines, you can easily compare the software installed on them.
C:\Users\Ravi> Compare-Object
-ReferenceObject (Get-Content C:\a\Ravi_PC.txt) -DifferenceObject
(Get-Content C:\a\Promod_PC.txt)
Any entries with a side indicator pointing to the right (=>) mean that
the software is installed on my laptop but
not on my Lab PC, and any entries with a side indicator pointing to the
left (<=) mean that the software is installed on my Lab PC but not on my
laptop.
