A Cheerful Goodbye
Installing new programs is easy. But not all of them uninstall as easily. Here’s what you need to know about installs and uninstallers

Which is the theory that’s common to the creation of the universe and the creation of an application on your computer? Anyone who has delved even a little deeper into computers and metaphysics will know that it’s the Big Bang Theory. Windows applications literally explode on your hard drive and throw debris over your precious hard disk acreage. New software can make extensive changes to your system. But if those changes bring about undesirable results what do you do? And how do you clean up your system of digital debris which applications leave behind? Here we will cover some of the problems faced by people who need to install and uninstall software on the Windows 95/98 platform.

Most Windows applications almost invariably make changes to system files including the Windows Registry. But we won’t traverse the labyrinthine structure of the Windows Registry here. We will only cover the files installed on your system by applications. Learning more about these files and separating the essential ones from the chaff can regain hundreds of megabytes on a typical system and also make it more stable and greatly improve performance.

Where do the new files go?

When you install a new program most of the files are copied to a folder in C:\Program Files. There are some programs which create their own folder on your hard disk. You can choose to copy their files into the Program Files folder, (by changing the file location during install)—that way you only have to look in one folder and not scout around on the hard disk. Besides this, the installation program may scatter files in the following folders: C:\, C:\Windows, C:\Windows\System, C:\Windows\Temp, C:\Windows\Desktop, C:\Windows\Fonts, C:\Windows\Start Menu...and so on.

Control the Big Bang

The installation programs for many kinds of applications have a custom install option. If you know enough about the software and what you are going to use it for, go in for a custom install. Large software suites such as MS Office provide much flexibility regarding the components which you can install. Go through each and every component and consult the online help if available and deselect those components you’re not likely to use. For example, MS Office has various kinds of filters which enable you to work with files of other Office suites or applications. Deselect the ones you don’t need. Even if you are not sure, deselect it because many applications including MS Office allow you to add components anytime afterwards. You can do this by going to the Add/Remove Programs dialog box and selecting the application for uninstalling. The setup program will start again, and you can select the components to install. With this method, in MS Office alone, you may end up saving hundreds of megabytes of disk space.

Not all programs support this kind of modular installing. So make sure beforehand—otherwise you may need to uninstall and reinstall afresh.

Weed out the digital debris

Font files Certain folders such as the C:\Windows\Fonts folder, are not ordinary folders. This particular folder contains the fonts installed in your system. Many applications, especially multimedia programs install new fonts on your system and don’t always remove them when uninstalled. These fonts not only take up disk space, but also make your system progressively slower as more and more fonts are installed.

If you have a record of which fonts correspond to which application, then you can safely delete the corresponding fonts after the application is uninstalled. To do this go to Fonts from the Control Panel and right-click the font you want to remove and click Delete.

DLL files Most Windows programs depend heavily on the dynamic link library (.dll) files to carry out important functions such as displaying things on screen, playing the sound, etc. When you install a new program, new DLLs will get added, old ones may get overwritten, and so on. Once you have uninstalled a program, it’s safe to remove the DLLs related to it only if other programs don’t use it.

Shortcuts Look at all those icons installed by Windows on your desktop. Their job is to act as pointers to the application you want to launch; that is they contain the path to the application and are not the application itself. So if you double-click on them, you launch the target application. Shortcuts that are not needed anymore, or made by applications are quite safe to delete. But don’t delete shortcuts which were placed there by Windows.

It is more common for shortcuts to get left behind in the Start Menu- Programs group. Windows has a very convenient way for managing these shortcuts. Right-click on the Taskbar, select Properties and click on the Start Menu Programs tab. Then choose Remove, select the redundant shortcuts and then click on the Remove button. The easier way is to get an uninstaller or a utility like Norton Utilities to scan for redundant shortcuts and present them for removal.

Temporary files Do you depend heavily on a scratch pad while doing your math? If you do then you have something in common with Windows. Windows and Windows applications love scratch pads. These are the files with the tmp or temp extension. Ideally they should be located in the C:\Windows\Temp and the C:\Temp folder. But not all applications follow this convention strictly. A good uninstaller should ferret out these and line them up for deletion. Or you can do a search for them using wildcards—search for *.tmp and *.temp files. Don’t be surprised if you see hundreds of them. Sort them by date and delete all except the ones with the current date. Search and delete temporary files especially after you install new software and whenever your computer has been shut down incorrectly.

Files with the .bak extension are also generally safe to delete. Some of them may be quite large; for example you may find files named something like system.bak, most probably in your Windows folder. This is most likely the back up of one of the files which has the Registry. It is generally safe to delete such files. You can also do a search for the following less ubiquitous files and delete them: ~*.*, *.~*, *.?~?. Two other kinds of files which can be deleted are those with the extension fts and gid. These are help support files. A search for them may return hundreds of hits, including those which are currently required by existing help files. But you may delete them all as Windows creates new ones whenever the corresponding help file is launched.

Folders So that’s about files. What about folders? Well, there may be dozens of folders on your system which applications and Windows create, but it’s a mind-boggling task for a newbie to select the right ones for deletion. If your have MS Office installed, then you may find hundreds of the folders on your system named ~Mssetup.T and files by the name Mscreate.dir. Delete these setup files, as they are useless after the installation process. After you uninstall an application, its very likely that it has left behind its main subfolder to haunt you after its gone. As mentioned, by default, applications install themselves in the C:\Program Files folder or the root directory. These are amongst the safest folders to delete after the application is uninstalled; but make sure that you don’t want to retain any data or configuration files which may be there. It is advisable not to delete the folder until your system has been rebooted at least once after the application was uninstalled.

Using uninstallers

Uninstallers are programs which assist you to keep your system free of digital debris of many kinds. However, their primary function is to try and completely remove all traces of the program you want to uninstall. Besides this, it may also have functions which can remove Active X controls, invalid registry entries, cookies, duplicate and redundant dll files, duplicate files, temporary files, unnecessary setup files, browser cache files, help and help support files, unused files. It can also help you to search out other files which can be deleted, like multimedia files, large files, etc. It may also provide a very convenient interface for carrying out these tedious tasks.

How do they work?

Uninstallers use two methods for achieving their main purpose of removing traces of installed programs. These are: Real-time comparison and Disk contents comparison.

In a real-time comparison the uninstaller keeps track of the changes while you’re installing a program and logs it in its database. In a disk contents comparison, the uninstaller makes an image of your hard disk before and after the installation is done. It then compares these images to arrive at the changes carried out by the program. These changes are logged in its database and used at the time of uninstalling the application.

Both these methods have their pros and cons. Some program installs don’t lend themselves to real-time monitoring and may crash or hang your system, though this situation is rare. The second method can be very effective, but it is almost always more time consuming, especially if you have a lot of files on you hard disk.

Some uninstallers can use both methods. Real-time comparison is more common in commercial uninstallers. Freeware and most shareware uninstallers generally employ the method of disk contents comparison.

These two methods can work only if you had the foresight to install the uninstaller before you installed the application you want to remove. But what if you want to remove an application that was installed before the uninstaller? In fact most people investing in an uninstaller buy it for cleaning up the mess created before the uninstaller came into the picture. A good uninstaller should be able to remove these programs too. Many claim to. But in reality, none of them do a very satisfactory job. This is because the way Windows applications are installed is very complex. So just like the fact that each and every criminal case cannot be solved even by the best detective, an uninstaller cannot always perfectly recreate the scene of crime and the events which happened; which in this case are the events which occurred during the program’s installation.

Uninstaller tips

Choose the best uninstaller An uninstaller should be thorough and fast. Some uninstallers are excruciatingly slow and can test your patience. If you are buying an uninstaller for cleaning up an existing mess, then don’t go for anything less than the best commercial uninstaller. CleanSweep is quite good. Shareware and freeware uninstallers like Uninstall Manager and Inctrl4 are good at logging changes. But you will need to manually removing files and entries in the registry and system files. A task only for advanced users.

Wake up, it’s install time! The top-of-the-line uninstallers like CleanSweep, Norton Uninstaller, etc, generally kick themselves out of slumber automatically, whenever you begin to install an application. But this may not happen every time. There’s a reason for this. Every program you install in Windows has installing instructions in a setup file. In simple programs of course, these instructions are contained in the same file as the program itself. These small programs can be named anything that their developer fancied—the program’s name, or something cryptic like Z1X6tt.exe, or anything else. The installation files of larger and more complicated applications generally have multiple installation files and the setup files are named setup.exe, setup32.exe, setupcd.exe, etc. These names act as alarms for the uninstaller’s monitor to wake up and do its job. From the terminology used for naming the setup files, you can see that it’s almost impossible for the uninstaller to differentiate every installation or setup file from a normal executable application. So it sometimes fails to wake up in time. It’s a good thing to start the uninstaller before installing the application. Almost all uninstallers let you do this. And of course, remember to send it back to sleep when you are through. But before you toggle the uninstaller back to its slumber, run the new program once and try out a few if not all the functions. This is because some applications make changes to your system after they are installed and run for the first time; you need to log these too.

Get a control The sleeping and waking of the uninstaller’s monitor program can generally be controlled by right-clicking its system tray icon. Most uninstallers can add and delete setup file names which it recognizes as such. The interface for this should also be available through the system tray icon.