How to detect if an app was already installed before

Posted by Dante on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Dante
Published on 2012-03-30T14:19:01Z Indexed on 2012/03/30 17:41 UTC
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security

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Windows

How do software applications keep track of whether the user already installed the application before in it's Windows system?

Say you install app X, trial version, remove it, then re install it, and when you run it again it detects you had already installed it before. If you uninstall and clean all registry information it shouldn't know you had already installed it before...

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to "hack" any application, just thinking about how this is implemented.

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