There comes a time when no matter how much hard drive capacity we have, we think it's not enough. This is especially true for users that have the habit of installing and trying every program or application that seems interesting to them. And once our hard disk is full, our first thought is to start erasing programs and files that we don't use anymore. Another reason one might think to do that is because the PC takes ages to start, despite having lots of RAM and a fast proccessor.



Most applications have an uninstall program that removes all files the application had installed on the PC. It seems however, that not all uninstall programs do a good job in removing these files. In fact, for the vast majority of software out there, uninstall programs usually leave unwanted files and registry entries. Sometimes because the developers wrote sloppy code, other times because they want to make sure that you can't just uninstall and then re-install trial versions of the software after the trial period expires. Whatever the reason, we are usually left with ever slower PCs and ever increasing needs of storage space.

So let's start discussing ways to completely remove all traces of an application from a system. First of all, you can try using Windows Installer Clean Up, a program found in Windows XP installation CD. It is located inside the Tools folder and needs to be installed separately. If you don't have the installation CD, you can always download the latest version of the program from Microsoft. Windows Installer Clean Up allows you to view applications that don't appear in the classic add/remove programs menu and it also allows you select multiple applications to uninstall in one go.

There are cases, however, where you can still see the application present in the add/remove programs window, even though you uninstalled it. This usually means that entries for that application still exist in the Windows registry. To remove them, you will need to tweak your registry a bit. This is pretty easy to do, but also very dangerous. But don't worry, unless you start deleting entries without knowing what you're doing, you should be fine. Just stick to what you know and you should have no problems editing the registry. So, the first thing you need to do is open the registry editor program. Go to start, then run and then enter regedit in the command box. Then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionUninstall. Every key you see stored in that folder represents one of the applications you see in the add/remove programs window. Cool huh? All you need to do now, is browse through this folder and find out which application it is you want to remove. Just right click on it and choose delete. What this will do is delete the information that this application exists from the registry. This will NOT uninstall the application. In fact, if you did not run the uninstall program and you just remove the registry entry, you might make matters worse. So always run the uninstall program of an application first, before you start tweaking and poking your system.

But that's not all. Some applications copy DLL files (Dynamic Linking Libraries) to system folders. So even after you've erased the application folder and the registry entries, you may still have unwanted files in your system. A very good freeware program to locate these files is DLL Archive. It will scan your hard drive for DLL files and give you the option to compress and store unused files so that if something goes wrong, you can always restore them.

So hopefully, you now have a better idea of how Windows work when it comes to adding and removing software and why some PCs seem to run slower as time passes. Sloppy code and installation / uninstallation scripts are to blame! Being a software developer myself, I know that it's a pain having to declare everything in the install / uninstall scripts, especially after you've worked long hours to make your application work as desired but this is no excuse. Just because Microsoft Windows allow s developers to take some "nasty" shortcuts with regards to a program's resources (contrary to Unix) it doesn't mean one should!