Before you can use any application, you sometimes ought to create an installation using a software installer. The majority of solutions are shipped in a packed format. Programmers who care to save time or customer support service costs you can choose to use an open source or commercial install maker. Microsoft has developed the Windows Installer for its Windows platform that lets programmers create installation. There are a number of other commercial installation software applications you can find for Windows XP: InstallShield, Smart Install Maker and several others. All of them can make the so-called packages that can help you install software on any Windows system. Not happy with commercial installation creator programs? Those who prefer open source applications can have a look at Innosetup and a couple more solutions that may be obtained for free. A lot of developers choose to make their products work on different systems.



It is often quite a hard job to make various installation packages for some different platforms. Developers have to produce and test each installer, be it for Linux, Mac OS or Windows XP. The good news is, though, that you there exist anumber of cross-system installation software programs. For instance, InstallAnywhere that is a commercial install creator, or an open source Java install generator for different systems called IzPack. What has been placed onto your computer once, may have to be removed later. In the past some programs contained no uninstallers, so some 3rd-party uninstallers were to be used. However, nowadays a lot of software solutions feature more or less adequate uninstallers, therefore you do not have to think a lot about getting a different application to erase stuff off your hard drive. Nevertheless, even now there might be use for third party uninstallers. One of the reasons for that is that some applications prefer not to erase themselves completely leaving some add-ins behind. An additional trouble that such applications might help with is erasing Trojan and spyware. If the application you have just installed seems to show some bad intentions, a third party uninstaller might prove to be the thing you need. Uninstallers often have some extra abilities such as handing cache memory and managing temporary files, etc. Installers: what are they and what do they do?