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I work as System Administrator for more than 15 years now and I love to make my life easier by automating work & personal stuff via PowerShell (even silly things like food recipes list generation).
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Various PowerShell functions for Windows clients, servers, Active Directory, etc.
All credit goes to MrModaeus and his answer on Reddit This post is intended to hopefully make it more discoverable in Google searches for anyone else with the same problem. Long story short the error "The system cannot find the file specified" when ...
Or any other Azure service requiring special authentication strength
If you are using Azure Local (HCI), you might find the following PowerShell script AzureLocalVMImageUpdater.ps1 useful. What is it good for? The code replaces the Windows VM images in the specified Azure Local cluster(s) with the latest compatible ve...
Problem It happens that the hardware hash of your Autopilot device gets changed. Thanks to the replacement of the motherboard or some other issue. This can lead to future problems when your users need to reinstall the operating system, but the Autopi...
Learn how to use undocumented Azure APIs for massive performance gains
Keeping a secure, version-controlled backup of your Intune-managed device data, including BitLocker, LAPS, and FileVault keys, is a best practice for any modern IT team. In this post, I’ll guide you through an Azure DevOps pipeline that automates the...
Recently I came into a situation where I needed to provision new Dell Precision laptops for our employees. This laptop comes with a lot of preinstalled applications (bloatware) so I was looking for some simple but efficient way to silently remove them. And by efficient I mean avoiding the need to manually find an uninstall command for each preinstalled application.
As always PowerShell and registry property QuietUninstallString were my saviors 😉.
Use function Get-InstalledSoftware and Uninstall-ApplicationViaUninstallString functions from my CommonStuff PS module like 👇
# Uninstall every application that has 'Dell' in its name.
Get-InstalledSoftware -appName Dell | Uninstall-ApplicationViaUninstallString
As you probably know, a list of installed applications is stored in two registry keys: HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall, HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall.
What you might not know is that almost every application that is stored there has defined properties QuietUninstallString and/or UninstallString. Applications installed via EXE have typically both these properties but MSI have just UninstallString.
EXE installed application 👇
MSI installed application 👇
UninstallString property contains /I instead of /X parameter (/I means 'install' and /X means 'uninstall')QuietUninstallString property but when used, it normally runs uninstall wizard GUI. Hence there is no guarantee that QuietUninstallString will really start silent uninstallation 😞.addArgument to the Uninstall-ApplicationViaUninstallString function (in the case of the "Dell Optimizer Service" application mentioned before I've added -silent parameter to the uninstall command).With the information above in mind, I've created two functions that work together: Uninstall-ApplicationViaUninstallString and Get-InstalledSoftware. Both of them can be found in my CommonStuff PS module and be used like this 👇.
Both also support TAB-completion, so it is super easy to get the app name.
Just in case you are curious, my final solution for the Dell Precision laptops looks like this:
$SWName = Get-InstalledSoftware "Dell", "Microsoft Update Health Tools", "ExpressConnect Drivers & Services" | ? DisplayName -NotLike "Dell Command | Update for Windows*" | select -ExpandProperty DisplayName
if ($SWName) {
try {
$SWName | % {
$param = @{
Name = $_
ErrorAction = "Stop"
}
if ($_ -eq "Dell Optimizer Service") {
# uninstallation isn't unattended without -silent switch
$param.addArgument = "-silent"
}
Uninstall-ApplicationViaUninstallString @param
}
} catch {
Write-Error "There was an error when uninstalling bloatware: $_"
}
} else {
"There is no bloatware detected"
}