Rants, Raves and Revelations – August

Application Deinstallers — Why Bother

By Harry {doc} Babad © 2007

An Ignored Risk from Mostly Free Software Toys — As I was working on my review of CleanApp 2.3.1, for this issue, I noticed I’d spent a great deal of time explaining they why’s what’s and wherefores of using an application deinstaller. Most of us don’t, which is not a good thing. It was good material; at least I thought so, worthy of sharing with you the reader but detracted from the review. So I’ll rant about it here.

I’m sure you know about application proliferation. You get an email from a buddy and he found this neat of a software toy, you’d simply love. You’re thumbing through Macworld or Mac|Life and there’s an amazing sprinkling of gems, some of the just right for you. You might even be a shareware reviewer or worse yet junkie and you download lots of goodies from MacUpdate and install them, just to see how they play. Since most products these days come as try-before-you-buy mode; you do.

Six months later, having had a bit of fun, you’ve perhaps got 50-200 MB of new applications installed, many of them with expired demo periods. Yep, just lying around cluttering up your hard drive.

My keeper list for such download testing is about one item in 20 or 30. [Keepers are the items I both have licensed and use — the emphasis is on use!] What’s your batting average?

Installing Applications

Installing an application is more than a drop and drag of a piece of software to your applications folder. The act of installing and launching the application adds not only that piece of software to your application folder (or wherever you dragged it.) It also, after booting it, installs other files that allow the application to function more effectively. Like what you ask? Well user preferences, your serial number, temporary files, activity log-files of various kinds, at times data, and other sometimes undisclosed stuff.

For example, PandoCalendar X, a really easy to muse functional desktop calendar scatters its components like dandelions in the wind.

The only way to strip out all of an application components in to use a de-installer. Tools like CleanApp and AppZapper find all the components of the applications and identify then for you to delete. The have some limitations, for the most part intentional.

• Deinstallers will not remove the documents created by the application you’re removing. That good. If you are switching from MS Word to NeoOffice, you’d really not like to loose all the documents (that book, recipe collection and those love letters) you’ve written.

• If you delete an application, one that stores information inside the application itself or in its preference file, that information will be lost. I did that several years ago wit a corrupted version of PandoCalendar — fortunately I had a recent backup.

• Deinstallers, at least those that I’ve tested don’t remove an application’s alias files. I use such alias files as a means for launching an application with out putting it into my crowed dock.

Now not all developers make deinstalling as difficult as this article sounds. Microsoft, Adobe and Apple make life simpler. Most major commercial software comes with a deinstaller program. These programs can remove all of the applications components or selectively removal components as part of an update process. Again a risk, I had a custom dictionary that held five years of specialized vocabulary destroyed at a click of a mouse. (Yes it was backed up, and in the case of MSW, I even know where it was hidden.)

In Summary

Constant vigilance keeps the number of application on my drive to less than 150, but I am a software reviewer. Lies all lies, CleanApp found 477 applications squirreled away on my hard drive. If asked what I would toss if limited to 100 applications, I get rid of most the stuff Apple installed on my hard disk, likely breaking the system.

Keep asking your self:

• What do all those applications you’ve installed do?
• When had you used them last? The newest wasn’t always the better.
• Are they a special computer maintenance or security tool that it’s best to save even if you might not need it soon?
• Your replaced the old software tool with a new one, but haven’t thrown the old one away. Why?

Pack ratting applications is a great way to waste valuable hard disk space. At times the unused odds and ends can even lay you open to software incompatibility based crashes. Do you really need three applications for creating disc labels or five browsers?

Deinstalling Major Software — If one of your once favored applications, like MS Word or Adobe Acrobat comes with a de-installer application, everything but the documents your created are removed. I found this out the hard way when such an uninstall flushed my enormous custom MSW user dictionary.” Fortunately I had a copy on my last clone-based backup of my hard drive.

For the rest (ca. 99%) of your applications, tossing them for house keeping means using a de-installer. Try one, if you can get an extra year out of your hard rive by clearing g out the chaff, it’s well worth the $10 0r so dollars such tools cast.