There may be a time when you need to hide an installed application so that it will not be uninstalled. An easy way to keep an application from being uninstalled is to just hide it from appearing in Windows add/remove programs. This is easily achieved by adding the SystemComponent value DWORD in the uninstall section of the registry for that specific application.

Let’s say I want to hide the Zoom application from appearing in Windows. Currently, you can see it listed in the control panel

I can run the following powershell command to add the SystemComponent entry to the registry and set the value to 1 to hide the application:

New-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{57D6B477-1B0C-4C4B-8479-A89ACFDFD875}' -Name SystemComponent -Value 1

Now the application will no longer appear in the installed Applications section of Control panel.

To make the item visible again, just delete the SystemComponent from the registry.

I’m posting this as I spent too much time on figuring out how to convert the current IP of a machine and turn the IP address into an array. I needed this so I can change the last octet to a couple of other values that I would set later in the script. Powershell has an odd way of outputting data into different types such as objects. Objects can be frustrating when you just want a string output, but objects do give you all types of other possible information from the data you are querying.

I mean there is quite a bit of data to choose from, but I just wanted the IP address. So, after digging around, I realized I needed to pass a PSObject .ToString() to my variable which will return the string representation for this object.

Now that I can get the actual string value I need, I can then use split(‘.’) to split the string at each period character to an array. For some reason, getting just the string value on this one stumped me longer than it should have. So, here it is for anyone that ever needs this (Or myself for future reference). Splitting your IP address into an array.

$ipV4 = (Test-Connection -ComputerName (hostname) -Count 1).IPV4Address
$ipArray =  ($ipV4.ToString()).Split(".")

Write-Host("IPV4 Output :" + $ipV4)
Write-Host("Octect1 [0] :" + $ipArray[0])
Write-Host("Octect2 [1] :" + $ipArray[1])
Write-Host("Octect3 [2] :" + $ipArray[2])
Write-Host("Octect4 [3] :" + $ipArray[3])

Workstations – Automated patching. Daily. 6am. No reboot. Low risk to workstation users.

• 1Password
• Adobe Acrobat Reader*
• Microsoft Edge*
• Microsoft Teams*
• Teams Machine-Wide Installer*
• VLC*
• *Webex*
• XNView*
• Zoom*

Workstations and Servers – Automated patching. Daily. 6:15am. No reboot.

• *Defender Antivirus*
• Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool*

Monthly Patching – Servers and workstations.

All updates are manually approved. Reboots allowed. Patching is done manually, no automated schedules.

• Updates deployed to lab/dev/qa system endpoints first. Verify no issues with functionality for 24 hours.
• If no issues from lab endpoint patching. Update to pilot group of live sites for 24 hours. Pilot workstation group includes IT department workstations.
• If no issues from pilot group. Deploy to all workstation endpoints.
• If multiple endpoints at remote sites, do not deploy to all endpoints, break up patching into groups to ensure not all endpoints will be affected at same time during patching/reboots.

Server considerations

• Do not deploy to a master domain controller first. Apply to a secondary domain controllers, then patch master domain controller on following day.
• Server patching done outside business hours. Must have IT staff monitoring patching to ensure all servers operational after patching.
• Snapshot all VM’s before patching or patch after backup routines to ensure quick rollback if needed.

I hope this provides some visibility into my patching strategy and helps you with coming up with your own patching cycle. Every patching cycle should be strict and consistent to minimize risk to any organization, but yet flexible to work around business needs.

This is a small example I put together on how to quickly loop through each user SID in HKEY_USERS and find the value that shows what the wallpaper is set to for each user. This little script is a decent reference to use for finding (And with a little modification, setting) registry value(s) in the HKEY_USERS section.

<#
.DESCRIPTION
    Example to show how you can go through each user branch in registry 
    HKEY_USERS and retrieve the wallpaper file path key.
#>

$hkUsers = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey('USERS', $env:COMPUTERNAME)
$hkUsersSubkeys = $hkUsers.GetSubKeyNames()

$hkUsersSubkeys | % {

    $hkeyuserpath = "$_\Control Panel\Desktop"
    $hkeyuserpath = "REGISTRY::HKEY_USERS\$hkeyuserpath"

    Write-Host "`nUSER: $_"
    $wallpaperfile = (Get-ItemProperty -Path $hkeyuserpath -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue).Wallpaper
    Write-Host "WALLPAPER: $wallpaperfile`n`n===================="

}

A simple method I like to use when I want to quickly run a powershell script to download a file from a webserver. I use this when endpoints are not on an internal network so a network share is not always available, but since I am usually remotely calling the powershell script, Internet access is established.

The commandlet I use is Invoke-RestMethod. I provide the source url for the file on a webserver to download and the destination, and I’m done. Extremely simple and extremely effective. There are so many ways to do this, but this is the method I personally use the most.

The below example is what I have used to download the CleanZoom utility from Zoom that will remove any installed versions of Zoom on an endpoint, save the file in a temporary directory and then execute the utility.

<# --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	Uninstall all traces of Zoom from an endpoint.

    Script downloads the CleanZoom.zip file from Zoom.com and then extracts it and
    runs the utility.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #>
$src = 'https://assets.zoom.us/docs/msi-templates/CleanZoom.zip'
$dst = "$env:TEMP\CleanZoom.zip"
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $src -OutFile $dst
Expand-Archive -Path $dst -DestinationPath $env:TEMP -Force

Start-Process $env:TEMP\CleanZoom.exe -ArgumentList "/s"