Application Superpowers: Master Application Management with Nirsoft's InstallAppView

If you're an IT pro and you're responsible for supporting users and you don't have a massive budget and you don't have all these fancy endpoint management tools, but you still need to get a lot of stuff done in a small amount of time, often what you're dealing with is applications, removing applications or customizing newly purchased laptops, for your organization, let me show you a tool that's a whole lot better than the one Microsoft gives you. Let's take a look. Go start, oh yeah, settings, and then we go to apps. If you're already dying, thinking about doing a lot of work with applications and this is the tool that Microsoft gives you, unless you have those incredibly expensive endpoint management tools, which a lot of us don't have, let me show you a utility that you don't have to install, that you can put on a flash drive, that you can put on a network share and is free. Let's go take a look. Take your browser and point it to nerfsoft.net and when you get to the main home page, go to all utilities and I encourage you to follow me because if you don't, you'll get lost. Scroll down here until you get to system utilities. Click on system utilities and then slide down until we get to install app view version 109 and don't get caught up with the Windows 10 because I'm going to be using Windows 11 24H2. Works great on Windows 11. So go ahead and download that to a location. In this case, we'll put it in the download folder and then we'll extract it. Make sure you check the hash to make sure it's a legitimate program and then we'll extract it. We've downloaded it and I'm going to right mouse click and go ahead and extract and you can put this on a flash drive, you can put it on a network share, wherever you would like. Now after I've downloaded it on my Windows 10, I'm going to come up here, go to properties and make sure that it's unblocked. Microsoft is protecting us. That's okay. All right, so now we've unblocked it and let's go ahead and run the tool. In my case, I'm just going to right mouse click and run it as an administrator. Once you have the display, it shows all your applications in a spreadsheet view. You can go to any on this list, come over here to the app name and you can double click and it pulls up the specific information about that app that you've double clicked. If you roll across the spreadsheet, you've got the app name, app version, registry name, when the registry was modified. So if you're looking at time of install, there you go, and install folder, this is very interesting because we can see where this app or package is installed on the operating system. This gives me a column showing me install folder modified, install folder created, so we get date and time. We also have install folder owner and if you'll notice if I scroll this over, it's trusted installer. Remember, a lot of packages are installed during the initial installation of Windows and that's always going to be the trusted installer group. Here is the columns that are going to be most useful for you. You can right mouse click. Here's the uninstall column and notice it's a PowerShell. It gives you everything you need to run that in PowerShell and remove it. You can also come over here and this is the quiet PowerShell. So if I come over here, slide this over, I can now see if I want to double click, I can see it another way. Quiet uninstall command and if I just copy all of that and I run PowerShell and pop that into my PowerShell administrative console, I can run it and it uninstalls it with no prompting, no kind of display. It just quietly removes it. So this is really, really helpful. Here's a classic problem. You've been asked to remove Copilot from all of your business machines that you now purchase. Any of the new ones that come, your organization wants Copilot removed. So you can just right mouse click and notice you can uninstall it right here or quietly uninstall Copilot. You can also open the install folder. This makes it super handy for you to uninstall quietly, uninstall just with a right mouse click or you can copy and paste this uninstall to a network share again and that way anytime you get more PCs that need Copilot removed, you already have the PowerShell that will rip it out of any version of Windows. Now if I need to see apps that are available to all users, I go to options, I go to advanced options and notice right now I'm only looking at the current logged on user. So if I change this, I can look at local system, all users, and now I see apps that everyone can view. I can rip it out of the entire system so that no one will see Copilot. The same is for Cortana. If I want to get rid of Cortana for every single user that will log on to this laptop desktop, make sure you select all users and okay and now anything you do is going to remove it for everybody and of course many times you need to uninstall many items especially if you're creating an image. So you can go to options, allow uninstall of multiple items and now you can choose. I can use my control key and pick a number of these packages, right mouse click and uninstall all of them at the same time.