Every Windows user should get this thing.
If you’ve ever uninstalled software, you probably know that many programs leave crap behind; that’s why there are registry cleaners and unnecessary-file finders and so on. Sometimes it’s just a small entry in the Registry. Sometimes its an entire folder, or more.
It doesn’t matter whether you use Windows’ built-in Add/Remove Programs or the individual application’s uninstaller — junk gets left behind.
This becomes especially apparent when you use the wonderful freeware tool Revo Uninstaller. It finds the crap and removes it. Period.
I won’t go near Add/Remove Programs anymore. Instead, I have Revo on my Start menu and use it instead.
Start the program and you see icons for all your installed software. Double-click whatever you want to remove and Revo gives you four options. I always choose the last: “Advanced,” which “performs a deep and thorough scan to find all of the application’s leftover information in the Registry and on the hard drive.”
And boy, does it. I’ve removed maybe a dozen things since I got Revo, and every one has left a bunch of junk in the Registry, on the drive, or both.
Here are the Registry entries and leftover files it found when I uninstalled BlogDesk, for example:
Why software makers can’t get their products to uninstall properly, I don’t know. But I do know that I’m glad to have found Revo Uninstaller.
(Note: If you have TweakUI, you can use it to remove the Add/Remove Programs icon from the Control Panel completely, so you don’t forget to use Revo instead.)
Revo Uninstaller: Freeware
