Application Install Date - PDQ Inventory
Len Deamer
Is there a way for a more in-depth scan for applications? I've attached two photos. One is from Control Panel. The other is from the built-in Applications Report in PDQ inventory. It seems to match up quite nicely for the application name, version, etc... However, the install date is very hit and miss. Control panel has an install date for every application. PDQ's application report only seems to display roughly half of the install dates. This is really messing up my daily and weekly reports I auto-email to myself and my coworker. We like to be aware of unauthorized installs of applications.
Control Panel.JPG
PDQ Inventory.JPG
0
Comments
Hi Len,
If you do a fresh Standard Scan on that machine are you still not seeing that information populated?
We pull that information from the registry on the target machine at the following locations:
For 32 bit machines =
For 64 bit machines =
Do some digging and see if those install date values are populated by the software vendor and if so and a new scan doesn't help let us know.
Ah, I see. Those entries are, indeed, not in the registry. And, now that I've done some more research, I understand why this would be a problem for PDQ Inventory to have a complete and accurate account of all install dates. For future searchers, here is a paragraph from someone who definitely knows their stuff:
From Technet: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg558108.aspx
If the application uninstall information doesn’t include an install date or application size information, the guessing game continues. Add/Remove Programs searches the Program Files directory on all drives in a manner similar to the Start menu. It looks for a directory name with at least two words in common with the application name. If it still can’t find anything, it looks in the root directory of all drives.
The winning directory establishes the application size. The creation date is taken as the application install date. Remember, you can have Windows avoid this disk search by simply registering the application install date and size as part of the uninstall entry.
If more people knew how unreliable the Add/Remove Programs control panel can be, they’d be less interested in using it as a source for that information. Recently, a customer wanted to know how to get access to the “Last used on” information for each application so they could automatically uninstall programs that weren’t recently used. That’s only slightly more reliable than asking a teenager at the skateboard park next door how much homework he has tonight.
From the same article:
In Windows 7, the last of the disk searching disappeared. If an application doesn’t register an install date, Windows infers it from the date the registration information was created. If an application doesn’t register an estimated size, Windows simply leaves the column blank.
Why did this information slowly disappear from the Programs and Features control panel? When this feature was first introduced back in 2000, hard drives were tiny by today’s standards. Filling a hard drive was a frequent source of frustration. Over time, hard drive capacities have grown dramatically. Running out of disk space is no longer high on the list of problems faced by typical users.
Remember when Microsoft launched TerraServer in 1998 and everybody’s mind boggled at the concept of 1TB of disk space? Storage for all that data (around 3TB) occupied 324 hard drives in seven storage cabinets. Today, you can get 1TB of disk space for around $100—and it fits in your hand.
So, Windows 7+ must assign a variable for that. A variable that's not located in the registry, I'm assuming. Could WMI be used to get this information? I know it doesn't seem like a top priority, but this is very useful information for many of those of us in the SMB markets where software policies aren't as strict as they are in the enterprise.