Today I wanted to find the MSI uninstall string for a specific install of Adobe Reader on a remote computer. Seeing as using Win32_Product in WMI queries to look for installed software is not a good idea, and even Microsoft warn against using it, I needed to find an alternative.

This one is fairly long-winded, but it gets the job done. It will search both the 32-bit and 64-bit Uninstall keys in the registry.

"","Wow6432Node" | ForEach-Object {Get-ChildItem HKLM:\SOFTWARE\$_\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\ | ? {($_.GetValue("DisplayName")) -like "*Adobe*"}}

If you have any suggestions or alternatives, please feel free to post them in the comments.

I came across this code whilst looking through the built-in cmdlets that come with Windows 8.x. The function was located in storage.format.ps1xml and is used to format disk capacities in list and table views, so all credit goes to Microsoft for this one.

I’ve since appropriated it as a helper function in another WMI/CIM-related script, as it’s quite handy for converting the raw byte values that Get-CimInstance returns.

function ReadableStorage ($size) {
    $postfixes = @( "B", "KB", "MB", "GB", "TB", "PB" )
    for ($i=0; $size -ge 1024 -and $i -lt $postfixes.Length - 1; $i++) { $size = $size / 1024; }
    return "" + [System.Math]::Round($size,2) + " " + $postfixes[$i];
}

Here are some examples of it in action:

PS C:> ReadableStorage(1024)
1 KB

PS C:> ReadableStorage(2147483648)
2 GB

PS C:> ReadableStorage(12384898975268864)
11 PB