As a tiny effort to tame the immense mutability of Windows, at least for the question of "what programs are installed at which version?", I'm using a combinatio

As a tiny effort to tame the immense mutability of Windows, at least for the question of "what programs are installed at which version?", I'm using a combination of Chocolatey (an unofficial package manager for windows, https://chocolatey.org/ https://chocolatey.org/) and Git. I maintain a 'packages.config' xml file in a git repo that lists all the packages I decide I want to be installed and their versions. I intentionally don't list dependencies of the packages I want in this file, so I can remove a package later and I don't have to trawl through the huge list of potentially unnecessary packages now that I've changed what I want. I don't (typically) manage the version number listed in packages.config, I have a few scripts to help me do that: install.ps1 has two uses: 1. install on a new system by cloning (or downloading the zip of) the repo and running the script, which will download and install the exact versions of the software that is declared in packages.config. 2. If I want a new package I can edit the packages.config to add the line then run install.ps1 (this second capability could use some UX work). update.ps1 lists all of the packages that are currently out of date, gives you the option to update all of them, and then (regardless of which option you chose) rewrites packages.config with the currently installed versions. This allows you to use git to identify and manage the version differences between multiple windows installations and also upgrade all of them easily. This doesn't configure any of the applications, but at least they're installed and they're the same version when you move from one computer to another. You can also quickly identify version differences between installations which makes debugging application version problems much easier. And you also don't forget what you have installed.