Microsoft Games

[hitechgreg]

I need to be able to view PCs in my environment that have MS Games installed. Our last admin installed games for a select few people in our domain and i need to remove them, but i have no way to see who actually has them. Can someone help with a custom report?

Thanks in advance!

[RTI_IT]

Looks like you already took care of business, but I'll throw this out there in case someone else comes looking for a solution.

If your'e going with a "nobody can have it" approach, then I'd skip the reporting and just make a bat file or powershell script to remove them at next logon, add it to Group Policy, and let GP clean up the mess for you.

Dism /online /Disable-Feature /FeatureName:"InboxGames"

[Susan_A]

As your initial post did not mention specific games, I thought a better approach would be to look for a registry key that indicates whether or not the Games feature is enabled. More specifically, LastRunTime should indicate when Games was last run. As mentioned in my previous post, I'm not sure how accurate this will be however. I only tested on a few machines.

In general, good options for detecting something not listed in Add/Remove Programs are:

• If there are associated services, building a report based on tblServices/tblServicesUni.
  
• Scanning related files with custom file scanning.
  
• Scanning related registry values with custom registry scanning.

If you're not sure which file/key/service to report on, you'll need to do research online. Some trial and error may also be involved. Our reps won't fully test each file/key. Scanning of Windows "features" like Games will actually be built into Lansweeper 6.0 however. (No beta's available for 6.0 yet.)

[hitechgreg · Accepted solution]

Susan.A

The report you created works, but it gives a lot of false positives. I found that the games are actually installed like most programs but they're always under "program files" even on x86 computers.

So simple fix for this question was just to create a custom scan that would search for the following items...
%programfiles%\Microsoft Games\Solitaire\Solitaire.exe
%programfiles%\Microsoft Games\SpiderSolitaire\SpiderSolitaire.exe
%programfiles%\Microsoft Games\Mahjong\Mahjong.exe
etc..

Now i see exactly who has games installed.

I still don't know why that registry key is being access even thought there are no games installed...

Never the less i still appreciate your assistance.

Thanks

[hitechgreg]

Susan.A THANK YOU!

This is exactly what I need. I really don't need to know what games, just that they're installed.


MakeBug - I couldn't agree more.. WHY is the question of the ages.

[Susan_A]

There's no built-in functionality for verifying the existence of a folder. File scanning can only be used to report on specific files, not folders, though you could probably create a deployment package to verify the existence of a folder.

Not sure how accurate this will be, but a quick online search seems to suggest that machines with Microsoft Games enabled should have a value name called LastRunTime under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\GameUX\MachineSettings. You could scan this value with custom registry scanning and then run this report to list machines with Microsoft Games enabled:

Select Top 1000000 tsysOS.Image As icon,
  tblAssets.AssetID,
  tblAssets.AssetName,
  tblAssets.Domain,
  tblAssets.Username,
  tblAssets.Userdomain,
  tblAssets.IPAddress,
  tblAssets.Firstseen,
  tblAssets.Lastseen,
  tblAssets.Lasttried
From tblAssets
  Inner Join tblAssetCustom On tblAssets.AssetID = tblAssetCustom.AssetID
  Inner Join tsysOS On tsysOS.OScode = tblAssets.OScode
Where tblAssets.AssetID In (Select Top 1000000 tblRegistry.AssetID
  From tblRegistry
  Where
    tblRegistry.Regkey Like
    '%SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\GameUX\MachineSettings' And
    tblRegistry.Valuename = 'LastRunTime') And tblAssetCustom.State = 1
Order By tblAssets.Domain,
  tblAssets.AssetName

[MakeBug]

which admin would install games for the users...WHYYY?

Anyways you should be able to simply check if the folder "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games" exists (at least for 32bit Windows 7, it might be a bit different in other operating systems).
I have no idea how to remove them via Lansweeper, maybe this helps: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/add-or-remove-windows-features-through-the-command-prompt/