Jo-Anne said:
A number of the programs I've installed on my WinXP computers come with
their own uninstaller programs. To uninstall, is it better to use Windows
Add-Remove Programs or the individual uninstallers?
Thank you!
Jo-Anne
The installer used by the program may record an entry in the Uninstall
registry key which you see as an entry in the Add/Remove Programs applet
in Control Panel. So whether you use the uninstall shortcut provided by
the installer or use the Add/Remove Programs applet, both point to the
same command and you end up running the same uninstaller program.
If their installer doesn't show an entry in the Add/Remove Programs
applet then all you have is their shortcut to run their uninstaller.
When you install a program, and after it completes, go check if they
added an entry that shows up in the Add/Remove Programs applet. If you
see it there, it's the same program that their uninstall shortcut will
run. If it doesn't show up there, use the uninstall shortcut they gave
you.
Not all installers provide for a clean uninstall. In fact, most
uninstallations are dirty. Part of that is the developers really don't
want to thoroughly test their uninstaller (I've been in QA long enough
trying to push the Dev group to build a decent uninstaller to know that
they are typically very sloppy about this aspect of their software and
often rely on the uninstaller program to do all the work). Part of why
an uninstall is dirty is that Windows generates registry entries and
creates files after the install has completed, like when you first run
or configure the program which after the install is all done. Part of
why dirty installs happen is that someone (like Marketing) pushes Dev to
only do a partial uninstall because, gee, all their customers must
really want their software so they leave behind settings in the registry
or files that permit a subsequent reinstall to reuse all that data
(i.e., their viewpoint is that you are only doing the uninstall to fix a
problem and will follow with another reinstall). Best is to use a
logger that monitors all registry and file changes made by an install
program. That includes not just monitoring the install of a program but
also loading the program to record its first-use changes to the registry
and any files it creates or modifies. To uninstall, you use their
uninstaller (whether in Add/Remove Programs or their uninstall shortcut)
and then follow with an uninstall (cleanup) by the install logger.
Currently I use Zsoft's Uninstaller but only because it's free. There
might be better uninstallers but I'm not forking out the money for them.
Some uninstallers are guessers: they don't monitor the installs and
instead make guesses as to what additional cleanup might be needed.
They may have some hardcoded rules for cleanup for well-known
applications and some of the versions of them but they don't know how to
cleanup all apps or all versions of the well-known apps. Revo
Uninstaller is one of those. However, no matter that you use the
uninstaller provided by the software or an install logger or a guesser
uninstaller, there will still be remnants left in your registry and
often some files are still left behind so for the most perfect cleanup
you end up doing it - provided you have the expertise to understand the
registry. Even then there may be entries left in the registry simply
because you cannot or should not delete all references to the
uninstalled software. For example, some programs save known algorithms
regarding other software in the registry and you don't want to delete
those references even if you uninstall the referenced software. Those
references may, for example, be indexed and deleting them would screw up
the references used by the program in how it manages conflicts or
behaviors between it and those other programs.
My rule is that you don't install anything that you might consider later
to uninstall. Don't pollute your system and then hope you can get it
completely clean later - unless you're willing to same image backups and
restore to them and lose everything you installed after that image
backup. Test unknown or untrusted software of which you are unsure that
you want to keep inside a virtual machine, or use multi-booting to load
a separate instance of the OS from another partition that you don't care
about polluting (and probably use imaging to revert to a baseline image
for that testing partition).
