how do I know if a program is installed on my machine?

Question

I am using a windows xp machine. downloaded an install.exe online and double clicked it. Nothing happenen. My question is how to find if there is an software installed on a Windows XP machine during a certain of time? If I found there was a software installed at about 2pm to 2:10pm May 1, 2010,but that was not what I was doing then I can delete it.

Answer 1

There is no "guaranteed way" to track installation on Windows.

If the program was using a regular installer wizard, it will have created a uninstaller entry, and you can find it in the list in the control panel, "add/remove programs". This list can be sorted by date, but this information is rarely reliable.

However, nothing forces an installer to do that. It can simply copy files somewhere, without generating more trace than that. The only thing to do then, if you have no idea about the name this program can have, is to search which files have been modified at this particular time, using Windows search, or another. But it will return a lot of results, and it will be long to evaluate which is a new thing.

In a guesswork, you can try to check the regular installation path (C:\Program Files), sort by date, and see if a folder was created there in the time you did this action. But this is only a wild guess, and again, no guarantee the program created files there.

Answer 2

Just check "Start -> Control Panel -> Software", and see if you find it in the list. But if you got no notification, it probably didn't install at all.

Answer 3

Surest way is probably to use the Everything search. Search for the program name, and if the only result is the .exe, then it did not install. If there's anything else then it did, at least partly. This assumes that the program name and associated files/folders are predictable.

Answer 4

In Windows Explorer

select C:
click Search...
select "All Files and Folders"
select "When it was modified?"
check "Specify dates"
specify dates ;-)