My Windows 7 operating system asked me to update my skype installation. I did follow update instructions but the upgrade failed. It however was a usual message in which Skype installer had detected an old installation of Skype. Hence it asked me to remove the older one and try again.
I went to the Control Panel > Programs -> Uninstall a program, which most of the Windows users would normally do to uninstall the old Skype installation. However, due to some reason the Skype was not listed in the programs list, perhaps for the longer registry entry than allowed or somewhat. Well, I will skip details of that for now.
My actual objective was to uninstall Skype. So I googled to find a way to do it using command prompt. I found an useful video at YouTube which showed how to do it. It worked, mostly, except for the last step however.
Following the video I ran the command prompt as an administrator by right clicking the cmd icon and choosing Run As Administrator. Following are the further steps, which I followed and one may follow as well.
Type wmic and press enter
Type product get name and press enter
It will scan for all programs installed on your machine and list them all (may take some time). Now, locate your desired program which you wanted to uninstall from the list and copy the name. In my case, the name of Skype installation was SkypeT 6.20
Now the final part is to run the uninstall command. To uninstall it will be:
Type product where name=”program name” call uninstall. Replace the program name. So I did try product where name=”SkypeT 6.20” call uninstall but it didn’t work for me! Hmm.. I think some kind of mismatching of name occurred, due to spaces in the name?? I am not sure, but here’s what did the trick for me.
Type product where “name LIKE ‘Skype%'” call uninstall and pressed enter. It asked for a confirmation (Y/N) and Skype was gone!! I could install the updated version thereafter.
