Finding/Changing Installation Details of Applications

Hi,

if we use regedit, we can find/change some programs' installation dates at
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall.

but i realized i could not find details on all the applications i installed. i searched on this topic, and a poster wrote at a tech site :-

"The InstallDate registry value appears to be used by Windows Installer-installed applications. Applications that use other installation technologies may not use that property or use a different format (or they may not store an install date in the registry at all)".

to me that sort of makes sense. So is there any other way to find/modify installation details for these programs? if not stored in registry then, where should i look and how do i identify it

eg. CCleaner - i could find the installation date in the registry. but let's say Hard Disk Sentinel. i can't find it.

The fundamental problem is right within your post:

or they may not store an install date in the registry at all

The standard way Control Panel expect to find such date it the "InstallDate" registry value, and when this is missing, there is no way Control Panel can ever display such date, because it's not stored. Programs that don't bother registering their install date may use their own methods of logging such thing or may not even bother at all. But the fundamental problem is that there is no direct way of knowing this, the solution, if any, is on a casy-by-case basis.

The most basic option is to hunt in the program's folder for some kind of log file, those often contain dates and other hints of the installation process. Lacking that, look at the dates of the files there, some times files are created during install (instead of siimply copying them) and as such their dates would be those of the install time (of course file system dates are 100% unreliable, so don't expect accuracy from there). Another place to look at could be their settings directory within AppData. Files there might correspond to first use date if they're not updated frequently, which at least can put a lower bound on an approximated install date (the program can't change its settings prior to its own install). If you have old image "backups" you can look there too and see if the program was installed back then.

Of course I'm just guessing and such investigation must be done on each thing separately, and you're not warranted to get any meaningful result. The definitive answer for non-compilant software is "you can't know for sure", only look for hints.

yea i c what u mean 'case by case' basis. it's 3rd party apps anyway who knows how they record it right? it's cool i have resolved the matter another way thx for ur reply.

Magnakai said:

... it's cool i have resolved the matter another way thx for ur reply.

why not share 'another way' with the community?