Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Question

Any programs that list software

Jul 13, 2011 7:12AM PDT

Does anyone know of any prgrams that I can save to a flash drive and then go around to different computers and just plug in the flash drive and the program will scan then list all the programs that are on that pc?

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Answer
Not possible anymore.
Jul 13, 2011 7:16AM PDT

Recent security patches now disable the autorun feature because such would be a fine way to go around to different computers and infect all those pcs!
Bob

- Collapse -
Answer
Re: all programs
Jul 14, 2011 4:51AM PDT

That's difficult.

I just counted on my Windows 7 PC.
I have some 2250 .exe-files on my PC (admittedly, some 65% in c:\windows\winsxs, c:\windows\installer and the recycle bin) and some 100 .com-files. You might not be interested in all those files.
Then of course we have the control panel applets, the jar-files (java executables), the services, the screensavers, the vbscripts, all of which can easily be described as programs also.

So listing just the things you're interested in on one PC is an interesting task also. Once it works in one, it's relatively easy to run it in all from your USB-stick.
One interesting detail: different drives. Here at home, my p:-drive is a local drive. Programs there should be included in the listing. At work my p:-drive is a network drive. That doesn't count as "on that PC". And if I happened to have a USB-stick or a CD in the drive which had .exe-files, would those count as being "on that PC"?

Kees

- Collapse -
Reply
Jul 14, 2011 6:24AM PDT

Well it's for my work. We have to do an audit on some hundred of computers and laptops and are trying to find a quicker way than looking in program files and all that stuff.

- Collapse -
A Workaround
Jul 14, 2011 6:29AM PDT
Belarc Advisor.

Not sure if it will run from a USB stick, but you can hold the .exe file on there and copy that over to each machine and run that. It will give you an HTML type read out of all hardware and software installed on each machine, which you can save and/or print out.

Mark
- Collapse -
Re: software inventory
Jul 14, 2011 6:42AM PDT

These programs certainly exist. If you can't find what you need write your own vbscript to look in Program Files and the registry.

Some links I found with google:
http://www.manageengine.com/products/free-windows-tools/free-software-inventory-tool.html
http://www.microsoft.com/sam/en/us/msia.aspx
http://www.lansweeper.com/
http://www.appdeploy.com/tips/detail.asp?id=128
http://www.clearapps.com/pc-inventory.html

Just the top of a very long list of hits for INSTALLED SOFTWARE INVENTORY.

The Belarc program Mark mentioned is only free for personal use. For corporate use, like yours, they have much better tools. See http://www.belarc.com/

Kees

- Collapse -
Good point
Jul 14, 2011 6:48AM PDT

I forgot that free download was for personal use only.

Thanks Kees.

Mark