Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 101
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05-10-2009, 03:33 AM
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Sooner or later every user encounters the situation where they try a program, decide they don't want it, and proceed to uninstall it only to find the uninstall goes wrong, or worse still, no uninstall program was included with the original program.
Normal uninstall utilities are of little help in this situation. That's because they work by taking a snapshot of your system before and after installing a software product and use the difference to uninstall that product if required. This is a useful capability but its weakness is that the uninstaller program must actively monitor every software product you install. Often this is not the case.
Revo is an uninstaller that works differently. It can uninstall a program without the need to monitor its installation. It works by automatically doing what an experienced user would do manually. It removes all the program's files, autostart entries and removes all obvious registry entries.
This process can never be better than an inspired guess, but it's sure better than nothing at all. I ran some tests by getting Revo to uninstall a product whose installation I had monitored using ZSoft Uninstaller, a before and after uninstaller.
By and large Revo did a fine job, though not quite as good as a skilled user would do manually. There were still some remains left over, notably files stored in the user/local settings folder.
That said, the leftover files did no harm other than take up disk space, and they certainly would not interfere with the normal operation of the PC.
Note that when you ask Revo to uninstall a program, it first looks for the product's uninstall program and will run that program if it is found. Only if the search fails will it try to remove files and registry entries itself.
Note, too, that Revo can also act as a before and after uninstaller, but frankly this is not its forte. The freeware utility ZSoft Uninstaller [2] is a better choice for this particular application.
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