Winget Powershell Woes

Thursday, October 30, 2025

Reminder to self: If you want to install PowerShell using winget in both 32- and 64-bit versions, you can use the -a (or --architecture) switch:

winget install --id Windows.PowerShell -s winget -a x64

But chances are it will try to upgrade your other PowerShell installation (the x86 one, or vice versa).

Solution: add the --force switch. This will just download the correct installation files and run them.

It seems PowerShell is notoriously hard to upgrade, even when using just a single architecture and even when it was originally installed using winget!

Also: The arm64 version of PowerShell cannot co-exist with the x86 version. When you install one, the other gets removed. Weird, since they install into different locations (Program Files vs Program Files (x86))