PowerShell: Get Information About Installed Applications Without Using WMI

From: How to Get Information About Installed Applications Without Using WMI by Alex K. Angelopoulos

In PowerShell, the simplest way to display the [Installed Applications] is to use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet (which has the alias of gci), then pipe its results to the Get-Item- Property cmdlet. (Get-ChildItem doesn’t retrieve information about the registry values contained within subkeys; it only lists the subkeys’ names.) So, the command that you’d enter in the PowerShell window would be

gci “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall” |ForEach-Object{Get-ItemProperty $_.PSPath}

I changed the syntax a bit, and here’s what I prefer:

dir HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall | ForEach { Get-ItemProperty $_.PSPath} | Select DisplayName,InstallDate, DisplayVersion | Sort DisplayVersion, Installdate | Format-Table * -auto  

The ability to change the sort order is handy for software inventory(When was that app installed?) and version troubleshooting, and

| Format-Table * –auto

”AutoFits” column widths.