Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Scripting Guide
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Taking inventory of the software installed on a computer is as important as taking inventory of the hardware installed on a computer. A software inventory helps you:
In the past, administrators taking software inventories had to purchase third-party tools or use a brute force approach to taking inventory. With the brute force approach, all the .exe and .com files on a computer (any files that potentially represent executable files for software programs) are retrieved. In most cases, this is far more information than you can use. For example, on a typical Windows 2000 Professional based computer running Microsoft Office and several other software applications, the brute force approach returns 1,742 .exe files. The amount of data returned, and the fact that the only information returned is the file name, can make it hard to determine the actual (and perhaps most meaningful) software products that have been installed on the computer. Among the problems you face when trying to analyze this data are the following:
In addition, having an executable file on your computer does not mean that the application has been installed. You could have a file named Winword.exe yet not have Microsoft Word installed.
The WMI Win32_Product and Win32_SoftwareFeature classes allow you to enumerate the software and software features that have been installed on a computer using Windows Installer. Limiting enumeration to software installed by Windows Installer does not provide a complete inventory of the applications installed on a computer. However, this approach does offer several advantages over the brute force method:
On the same Windows 2000 based test computer, a script listing only items that were installed using .msi files returned 77 records instead of the 1,742 items returned using the brute force approach.
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