How to list Softwares installed in your PC

Whenever you need to re-install your windows, the most difficult task is to remember which softwares to install after the windows is installed to keep your computer full of all the required softwares.



The simplest way of extracting the required data is via the WMI command line, wmic:

open cmd (as administrator) and run wmic product

Yes, that is all. It runs for a while and then spits out very detailed information on what is installed on the local system. If you need this information in a readable and organized way, use the following variation of above command to have wmic create a CSV file:

wmic product get /format:csv > Software_%Computername%.csv

OR 

open cmd (as administrator) and run wmic
you will see wmic console now run:  /output:C:\InstallList.txt product get name,version

The result is a nice complete list in CSV format in a file that already contains the computer name for easier processing later on.