Well, it's name says pretty much what it does. It watches software installations. InstallWatch Pro (version 2.5c at the time of this writing) can be found free of charge at Epsilon Squared web site (www.epsilonsquared.com). This is one utility that all network administrator/desktop support person should have. When you first install the software, it proceeds to create a database of your current system, i.e. directory structure, complete file list, file properties and CRC check, along with a focus on INI files, and complete registry scan. This will be the base system database.
InstallWatch Pro can be configured to be launched at start-up and to detect "software setups". You can customize what portion of your system you want to be considered for the scan, put exclusion schemes, select what registry hives you want to include, etc. So, what happens next? Let's say you want to install the productivity software XYZ on your machine. When you double-click on setup.exe, InstallWatch will detect that a software setup process has been launched, and will overtake operations from there. It will ask you to build a snapshot of your system in order to know the "pre-installation" state of your machine. This can take between 30 seconds to 20 minutes depending on your configuration (beware of cache folders, they are time-consuming to scan). When it is done, it gives control back to the installation program, and we install the software as we would normally do. After the installation, or after the reboot if it required one, InstallWatch will kick in again, again to perform a similar scan. The differences in-between the two scans are the result of the installation procedure. You have the complete image to this software. Doing this process for every software used in a site, IT personnel would have a complete database of software package signatures. This can be useful for deployment/troubleshooting purposes. Epsilon Squared also have another product called InstallRite, that supposedly does the same thing, but also include an "installation kit" export feature. I did not try this yet, but this apparently extracts a software installation previously monitored into a single self-extract file, for deployement purposes.
InstallWatch Pro can also be used through a wizard, which will ask you where the installation file is, which can be useful for certain files (like Microsoft patches) that install themselves without triggering InstallWatch. InstallWatch will perform the scan before actually launching the install file. You can also manually launch the different steps if you wish, Snapshot and Analyze.
1. A little bit about Tripwire
3. Same thing, but a different way
Table of contents