TL;DR Listing Your Installed Software

September 24, 2025

Six different ways to list the software installed on your computer

A critical element of Windows computer security is "update your software as often as possible".

However, Windows does not make it easy to identify exactly what software is installed on your computer.

Adding to the problem is that Windows comes in bits and pieces of optional software, and some additional Microsoft software is often added as a prerequisite to some other package.

You get at least five categories:

• Microsoft Windows as installed.
• optional features of Microsoft Windows, like "Terminal", "Sandbox", "Subsystem for Linux" and many others.
• Prerequisite Microsoft packages such as ".NET" (pronounced dot net), "AppRuntime", Visual C++ runtime, and so on.
• The actual software you installed.
• Additional packages that came with your software.

Our purpose here is to show you six different ways to list the software on your PC.

Here we go:

List of Icons of Software

The result is like the tagged photo: a list of dozens or hundreds of runnable software on your PC. However most are built-in Microsoft Windows programs and some are optional features of Windows.

Here is how you can generate this list:

    Hold down Windows-key and "R" at the same time
    A command box pops up
    type in shell:AppsFolder
    click OK

The result looks like this (truncated):

You can double-click to run the program, or right-click to select uninstall or update.

WINGET List of Software

You can get a text listing with the winget command.

Start a CMD program in Administrator mode:

Run "winget list" and see this result (truncated).

Run "winget list" piped through FIND to avoid the Microsoft items:

SETTINGS / INSTALLED APPS / List of Software

Search for "apps" in the Windows Search box and you will find the usual Apps list:

There is also the tiled view:

WMIC List of Software

This is fairly useless as it shows only a few of the installed apps.

A WMIC command produces this result:

PowerShell List of Software

This is also fairly useless as it shows way too much information, and cannot easily be reformatted.

Start PowerShell at the Windows prompt (or from a CMD line).

Type the command "get-appxpackage".

That is all.