Are you running your installation/uninstallation from System Context (NT Authority\System) and want to delete user registry? You can do that by parsing all the users in HKEY_USERS key. Under HKEY_USERS you will find user IDs starting with S-1-5-21. We need to search under all keys which are starting with S-1-5-21 […]
VBScript
19 posts
In a world where we have so many cloud solutions for backup (like OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive, etc), there might be still people like me who like to keep their personal files somewhere safe offline. Now, i usually keep my important files on a network attached storage, but for this […]
Before we dive into how to apply permissions with VBScript, we must first understand what secedit is. The secedit tool comes by default with Windows Os. Secedit configures and analyzes system security by comparing your current security configuration against specified security templates. To apply permissions with secedit, all that is […]
During the packaging of a certain application, there might be cases where a specific configuration file must contain some dynamic settings. For example, let’s assume that you need to write a specific IP, or a specific location in a config.txt file during installation, and let’s assume the configuration file has […]
The hosts file in Windows OS is an operating system file that maps hostnames to IP addresses. The hosts file is used to resolve hosts names before DNS, and it can be found in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\. It’s not very popular nowadays for applications to place anything in this file, back in […]
If you are working in a company which has many java applications and you do a lot of installers, you might end up in the situation where, during the install or uninstall process you might want to close a java process. However, if you open up task manager you will […]
Microsoft offers WiSumInf.vbs, which is provided in the Windows SDK Components for Windows Installer Developers. You can use this script like: However, by looking at their example and learning about the WindowsInstaller.Installer object we can create a shorter and simpler one to use. As you can see, each field you […]
In a previous post, i have shown how to create a self-extracting and self-installing .exe using 7ZIP SFX Maker. But what if you want a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for it? The steps are not so different. In this case i’m using 3 MSIs with one Install.VBS that install […]
One interesting situation that i was in a while back was that a customer wanted a big bundle of apps installed on several machines. Upon inspecting the bundle, this was made with an Install.VBS and contained more than 20 apps. Oddly enough, each MSI had an outside media (nope, […]
One downside with MSIs is the repair function. This is a challenge for all IT PROs to find a way to make the repair work when the source media is not present on the machine anymore. While there are some alternatives to repair custom user data or registry, if […]
This script is useful if you want to replace a certain string only in files with a specific extension. In this tutorial we will replace a string “Replace Me” with “This is replaced” only in files that have the “.txt” and “.csv” extensions, and another string “Hello” with “Bye” in […]
I’ve encountered some applications that, during installation, change the default printer for the users on the machine, regardless if it’s installed from an admin account or system account. To prevent this, you might want to look into the MSI custom actions, but if you don’t have that option, then […]