If you share your desktop with multiple people, at one point or the other you encounter a piece of alien software which no one will take the blame for when installed or uninstalled. A simple method will allow you to find out who originally installed / uninstalled a program on Windows.
If you are like myself and have shared or currently share a system among your siblings or other members of the household, you have no doubt run into the phenomenon of finding a new piece of software installed which no one will take responsibility for installing.
The following guide will walk you through how to identify which user account carried out the install or uninstall of a software, keep in mind that this is most effective if you have established separate user profiles for your system. Otherwise you will not have much success.
Analyzing System Logs To Learn Who Installed Or Uninstalled A Particular App
STEP 1:
Press Windows Key + S and search for Computer Management. You will see that simply searching for “Computer” brought it as a best match.
STEP 2:
When you have the new window open. You have look for Computer Management (Local) and from here navigate down the following branches: System tools to Event Viewer to Windows Logs and then Application.
When you have Application open, go to the far right of the window and click on “Filter Current Log”
Follow the yellow brick road below and you will have an idea on how to do it.
STEP 3:
A new window will open by the name of “Filter Current Log“, when it does you have to open the dialog box of “Event Sources” and navigate down until you find “MsiInstaller“. You have to tick the box to the left of it and proceed by clicking OK.
STEP 4:
Next, you will have an entire list of entries before you. Unfortunately none of the entries will be labeled. You have to go poking and probing through each entry one at a time.
At most you can navigate entries by date and time if you know the details of the mysterious of the software.
Here I have opened a random entry where I ended a duplicate installation of Google Update. When you double click on the box of your choosing, simply look for User on the bottom left of the box to find out who originally installed / uninstalled the software.
The only real limitation to this is that it will only show you a log of apps installed or uninstalled using MsiInstaller, i.e. video games installed by images or discs. You can’t find out who installed or did an uninstall of a Metro app on your system from the store with this guide.
The reason my user shows SYSTEM is because I am the sole user of the system and have not made independent user accounts on my installation of Windows 10.
This also works on Windows 7 and 8, you can still search for Computer Management in the start menu in Windows 7 and in Windows 8 with Windows Key + S.
This is a very handy method for helping find out the activity log on your system regarding the presence of software on your system.
Keep in mind that this guide is dependent on your system having individual user accounts on the system, otherwise the entire point is futile as the user will always appear as SYSTEM.
Let us know if you found this guide to be of help and if it helped you find out the culprit who installs that ONE search bar in your browser.
(via AddictiveTips)
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