According to many experts, PowerShell was created by Microsoft as a competition to the Linux shell because the Linux shell is just really very powerful and there is nothing that it cannot do. As such Microsoft gave birth to PowerShell and equipped it with a usual command line interface shell, scripting ability and the ability to manage the system configuration. Microsoft PowerShell is now available not only for Windows but also for Linux and macOS. Anyone can now download PowerShell for their system from https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell.
One of the abilities of PowerShell is that we can check all the installed software using the management automation. We can also remove an installed software using this method. Here is how:
- First of all we have to launch PowerShell with admin access. It is easy on Windows 11 -we can press Win+X and then select Windows PowerShell (Admin) from the menu that appears.
- In order to list all the installed software in PowerShell, we give the following command:
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Product
- Make note (copy) of the IdentifyingNumber for the software that you wish to uninstall. Then give these two commands to remove that software (replace GUID the IdentifyingNumber with the one you copied in step 2):
$trish = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Product -Filter "IdentifyingNumber = '{GUID}'" $trish.Uninstall()
- Now you can re-run the command to list all the installed software to check whether the same software has been successfully removed or not.
Among the few drawbacks of using PowerShell for uninstalling software from Windows 11, one is that it is not really convenient. When there are many GUI tools available for removing software, we should make life easy by using those GUI tools. Another problem is that PowerShell does not show all the installed software using this method which means that we cannot remove all the software using this method. But this method just gives us another option when it comes to uninstalling programs from Windows 11.