A tool to manage my currently installed software in a windows machine?

Question

I really like to try new things so I usually end with plenty of program installed on my machine.

I also have bough licence for some software.

When I want to re-install or install my OS on a new machine, I manually create a file that contains the soft name, its license, a link to the home page to get the installers.

From time to time I'm using the install/desinstall windows tool to maintain what I have installed, but it is quite a burden to use.

Is there any tools that will help me to track what I have installed, a kind of companion to this tool, on which I can add those metadata ?

This is not about creating an automatic installer or network image replicator. I would like to have a kind of 'media library' but tailored for managing installed software.

Answer 1

I know two tools that can help you:

• SIW (System Information for Windows): This one can make for you a detailed inventory (among the other things) that can export in several formats.

• NirSoft - UninstallView: This tool is designed to uninstall programs, but also makes a good list of them that can be very useful.

Extra bonus:

• The Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line. With this command you can have a plain text file that contains also your sw.

  wmic /output:software.txt product list