Computers are alleged to have become more user friendly, and thus more accessible to the
general public, over the last ten years or so. In a real sense, they have. I personally don't have
any real problem with command lines, even with the sine qua non of Non user friendliness, the
beloved OS/360 Job Control Language. When you are dealing with these (in today's view,
anyway) archaic user interfaces, at least you have some control over what is happening in your
computer. There is very little magic involved. You tell the computer to do thus and so, and it
does thus and so, and that is the end of the matter.
Windows is a little different. It certainly has brought computerness to the general public. If your
screen gets set up with a windowfull of icon refrigerator stickers, or W95 Start button items, all
you need to know to run the applications is how to click a mouse.
The thing that I do not like about the way windows works, is all the magic that goes on under the
hood. I refer especially to the installation process.
In the good old DOS days, you got a floppy from a software house, and originally originally in
DOS 1.0 days, you ran the product directly from the floppy, since there were no hard disks on the
original PC. Then the XT came out, along with DOS 2, and maybe you had to create a directory
on your hard disk and copy a few files somewhere. But you knew what happened, and where
things went.
Then software got too big for its britches and floppies, and the product started to get distributed
in a compressed form. And that meant that you needed some vendor provided piece of software
to install the software you bought, even if that only meant to uncompress it. But the vendae got
more sophisticated, and so they figured if you were gonna run an installation piece of software
anyway, maybe it could tweak some other things, like autoexec.bat files and config.sys files.
And maybe it would tell you what it was doing, and maybe it would not.
Then windows came out, and now it is quite impossible to install something without going
through a Setup utility, or an Install utility. Because windows essentially demands that your
software do some serious handshaking with the OS to get your applications installed. Generally,
this takes the form of slapping an icon into the program manager in Windows, or adding a new
step to the Start stairway in Windows 95; generating some INI files in W31 or worse yet,
fiddling with the Registry in W95; and sprinkling DLL files hither and yon around your disk.
If all you are ever going to do is fill up a humongous disk, or if you are not planning on getting
many applications, then none of this really matters. But there are reasons why you would want
some way of tracking down all these little bits and pieces of an application.
The first, of course, is just to get rid of it. It is not unknown to install a program, use it once, find
out that it is junk, and then want to just blow it away. Never let it darken your screen again. But
if you just get rid of the directory you installed it in, you still have little fragments here and there.
The second reason is to move it. Installing a program can be rather time consuming. It is one
thing, if you have just received a shiny new application, to take the time to shove in fifteen
floppies, or to answer a zillion questions that the setup screen usually asks. In the old days, you
could just move the directory, and you were done. Here again, there are all kinds of program
pieces that you have to track down and deal with.
The answer to all this is an uninstall program. The first one I used was about three years ago,
and it was named The Uninstaller. This was an early version for Windows 3.1, and quite frankly,
I did not like it much. Mostly, I did not trust it much. And trust is everything. If you are going
to have a program wander around your disk and make wholesale deletes or moves on you, you
have to have faith that it will not be too aggressive and blow away something that you really still
need.
These programs purport to do their job by first scanning the entire disk, to see everything that is
out there, especially dll's and exe's. Then, when you tell the program what it is you want to
delete or move, it scans that program and sees what links it has to something else (like a dll).
Those items are then recursively scanned until the program believes that it knows everything that
constitutes the application. Then it scans everything else, to see if anything else in the system
also needs those external functions, and if so, marks them as undeleteable. There are endless
possibilities for screwing up here.
I finally uninstalled The Uninstaller. When Windows 95 came out, I picked up CleanSweep 95.
I have, for whatever the reason, much more confidence with this program than I did with the
older Uninstaller. The initial version did not really understand the W95 registry at first, but
Quarterdeck has issued two free updates, and the current version does deal with the registry.
The program provides several different functions. First is just a wholesale delete. An option on
the delete is to archive the pieces somewhere, just to make sure that it did not overdo itself. The
archives can be deleted later, and it in fact prompts you if you have not deleted an archive after
30 days. You can also use the program just to create the archive, and not to delete things at all.
This can be useful for making simple backups of your applications.
Another function that I have used a lot recently is to Move an application. I just got a second
disk, and I want to spread my applications out over the two disks to make backing things up
somewhat easier, and to make finding things easier. The move function of CleanSweep is very
slick, and very fast, and appears to be quite reliable.
These functions can also be used to move an application to, say, a laptop computer, or maybe a
new upgraded computer, without having to reinstall the whole application from the original
floppies again. I constantly use a text editing program named WinEdit. When you install this
program, there is a little piece of paper that gives you a registration number, that essentially kills
a nag screen that will come up if you do not register it. When I got my new computer a year ago,
I still had the distribution floppies, but the piece of paper was not to be found. This program
allows you to archive the application in question, move the archive file, and then Restore the
program onto the new computer from the archive. Of course, that feature also would let
somebody pirate applications, but good people do not do that sort of thing.
Another feature in these programs is a scan of the disk to find a) files that appear never to be
used, by anything, and b) files that appear to be duplicates. The former could occur if you have
manually deleted some programs and missed a file. The latter could occur if you buy several
programs from the same vendor, which uses common dll files. WordPerfect does this a lot, but
at least it puts them all in a common directory.
The only flaw in these programs is that they do not recognize data files, readme files, and other
non directly related files that somehow end up on your disk during installation, but are not
needed by the program. When the program gets moved or deleted, these files get left behind,
because there is no way for the uninstall program to recognize that they belong to it. I would
think that there should be an option to just delete the entire directory, but at least with
CleanSweep, there is not.
CleanSweep does have the optional feature where it will launch a spy program at system boot
time that will constantly watch for a setup or install program to run. It then audits all the files
that the setup program puts on your disk, and where they get put, and keeps this list tucked away.
Now, when you want to uninstall an application that has been monitored, it knows exactly where
to go to find everything, without having to search the entire disk.
CleanSweep costs about $30. Uninstaller and several other such programs cost about the same. I
find them to be useful for the cost.
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