Your thoughts on Total Uninstall

[Berryracer]

I have had very bad experience in the past with Revo Uninstaller, plus, it doesn't support installations of programs that require a reboot as part of the installation process.

I asked on the forums of Total Uninstall and they claim to have support for such installations where Total Uninstall will launch automatically upon the reboot

Now before I purchase it, would you kindly :

1) Inform me how good is this program, your experiences with it

2) Will it pose any benefit if I install it now after I already have all my programs setup or that would be useless and I should keep it ready for my next format in order to have everything monitored from scratch?

3) Is the uninstaller any more effective than the Windows Uninstaller in the event that the setup was not monitored such as programs I previously had installed before I install Total Uninstall?

 

[mikeymikec]

I've just been looking at another thread of yours to do with "programs that help keep Windows clean"... what's wrong with the normal method of uninstalling a program?

Your best bet really is not to install so much... I'm going to say "crap" because if you're looking to uninstall it again, I doubt it was necessary in the first place.

IMO to do the job of uninstalling any better, you'd need a program that monitors and records every program's file and registry activity all the time, which would be a significant additional load on the system, as well as possibly upsetting other programs in the process, or possibly botching an uninstall in a much bigger way than was likely to happen in the first place.

 

[Berryracer]

I've just been looking at another thread of yours to do with "programs that help keep Windows clean"... what's wrong with the normal method of uninstalling a program?

Your best bet really is not to install so much... I'm going to say "crap" because if you're looking to uninstall it again, I doubt it was necessary in the first place.

IMO to do the job of uninstalling any better, you'd need a program that monitors and records every program's file and registry activity all the time, which would be an significant additional load on the system, as well as possibly upsetting other programs in the process, or possibly botching an uninstall in a much bigger way than was likely to happen in the first place.

So do you mean to say that uninstallers are snake oil? I dont want to waste 30 bucks if it is

 

[Etrusk]

I have used both Revo and TotalUninstaller. If you are not yet using an SSD they are definitely worth getting. With an SSD they are still worth it, but less so as you dont have to worry about fragmentation or speed that much.

Reason to use them is applications rarely remove themselves entirely from your disks, even if they say they do. On a HDD, crap left behind contributes to disk fragmentation and slows your PC. I have seens gigs of data left behind from crappy, generic uninstallers.

With TotalUninstaller you basically set two checkpoints, one just before the installation starts and one just after it finishes. You also want to avoid running any non-OS programs that write to disk during the installation.

In return you get a pretty snapshot of what installed and where it installed, so you can be sure to get rid of 100% everything (inc. registry changes etc.) when the time comes. If you are serious about keeping your disks garbage-free, I would highly recommend it.

Recently, after putting a fresh Win 7 install on an SSD I went with Revo, but only using its normal uninstall function (without the checkpointing). Revo starts the uninstaller that comes with the program, and when that's done it runs it's own scan.

Now I cannot be 100% sure it catches everything, but it almost always finds garbage left behind and rarely makes errors. That said, since I am not using checkpointing it is important to actually look at what Revo wants to delete - occasionally (1/10 times) it will flag some stuff which is not part of the uninstalled program. Eg. recently after uninstalling a Steam game it flagged some Steam files - but it was pretty obvious and easy to unclick.

Hope that helps.

 

[Berryracer]

I have used both Revo and TotalUninstaller. If you are not yet using an SSD they are definitely worth getting. With an SSD they are still worth it, but less so as you dont have to worry about fragmentation or speed that much.

Reason to use them is applications rarely remove themselves entirely from your disks, even if they say they do. On a HDD, crap left behind contributes to disk fragmentation and slows your PC. I have seens gigs of data left behind from crappy, generic uninstallers.

With TotalUninstaller you basically set two checkpoints, one just before the installation starts and one just after it finishes. You also want to avoid running any non-OS programs that write to disk during the installation.

In return you get a pretty snapshot of what installed and where it installed, so you can be sure to get rid of 100% everything (inc. registry changes etc.) when the time comes. If you are serious about keeping your disks garbage-free, I would highly recommend it.

Recently, after putting a fresh Win 7 install on an SSD I went with Revo, but only using its normal uninstall function (without the checkpointing). Revo starts the uninstaller that comes with the program, and when that's done it runs it's own scan.

Now I cannot be 100% sure it catches everything, but it almost always finds garbage left behind and rarely makes errors. That said, since I am not using checkpointing it is important to actually look at what Revo wants to delete - occasionally (1/10 times) it will flag some stuff which is not part of the uninstalled program. Eg. recently after uninstalling a Steam game it flagged some Steam files - but it was pretty obvious and easy to unclick.

Hope that helps.

One of the bad experiences I had with the Pro version of Revo Uninstaller.....

I formatted my system, started installing all apps while monitoring each one using Revo...

One day, a new version of Java was released so I uninstalled the older version using Revo Uninstaller and that went fine...

But to my surprise, when I launched Firefox, everything in Firefox was reset including my saved website cookies, addons, settings, etc, as if I had just installed Firefox fresh...

After that incident, I emailed tech support then they issued me a refund without explaining what might have happened or helping me solve it.....

 

[lxskllr]

Snake oil. Stuff left behind doesn't matter. If you're bored, you can manually delete the stuff left behind, but it doesn't affect performance, or anything else to leave it there.

 

[Nothinman]

Stuff left behind can matter in extreme cases, but that's usually not the case. Most apps query the registry for a few specific keys, they don't search the entire hive for something of which they already know the location.

Same thing for files left behind, if there's a directory with a few DLLs lying in it who cares? Nothing else is looking there unless they need that DLL. Sure, you probably lose a few MBs of space to them over the years but the effect on performance shouldn't be appreciable.

 

[Berryracer]

Snake oil. Stuff left behind doesn't matter. If you're bored, you can manually delete the stuff left behind, but it doesn't affect performance, or anything else to leave it there.

Thanks bro, you are one d00d I highly trust!

Thanks for saving me 30 bucks

 

[shadow_k]

you shouldnt bother with utilities most of them are snake oil except backing up software, file cleaner and defrag

 

[Nothinman]

you shouldnt bother with utilities most of them are snake oil except backing up software, file cleaner and defrag

Defrag and whatever you mean by "file cleaner" apps would be much more snake-oilesque than an uninstaller tool.

 

[mikeymikec]

I've seen 500MB-1GB left behind by AVG Free, or a Norton 360 backup repository, but unless an uninstaller leaves behind programs/libraries that are still integrated or running when Windows starts up, they're not affecting performance, unless you're very low on disk space.

 

[shadow_k]

Defrag and whatever you mean by "file cleaner" apps would be much more snake-oilesque than an uninstaller tool.

file cleaner as in ccleaner were it cleans junk e.g. temp

programs dont leave much data when you uninstall them may be like 1-5 registry entries and 1-20 files behind which wont affect system performace much maybe like 0.02%

programs like antivirus you should not use the windows uninstaller because windows wont remove all data left behind and this is why most antivirus offers a removal tool

http://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?page=content&id=SOLN146

also window 7 takes care of itself decently. if window xp use all the utilities you want you will see some improvements

Defrags does help if you have a old HDD.