Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Windows: Uninstalling programs

Time to clean up the old windows machine a bit (Linux user here).

So I go looking for the good old control panel, but I find the "Settings" so I go there. Let me skip the whole design and usability comments.

The thing is that when you click tap the Uninstall button there is some times a huge delay until the admin confirm thing pops up. I don't know why this is, if its a security thing or just a bug.

So I thought I could open the whole "Settings" as an admin and then the confirm thing would not pop up.

Long story short, the only relevant thing I could find was to open with admin the command prompt. And from there you can start the control.exe which is actually the old classic control panel. 

But nope, your are still in user mode.

After some googling research I found out that this is a fake cmd admin (the one in the start menu), you need to run `runas /u:administrator cmd` to get the actual admin cmd. And before you do that you need to kill the exploer.exe that already runs. 

Then to restore the explorer you need to open admin task manager to kill the admin exploer and open non-admin cmd and ....


PS: In this process I had the pleasure to uninstall the microsoft silverlight


done_