Monday, February 12, 2007

How to remove/uninstall unwanted programs

Out of curiosity we install many programs. But we never use them. We don't even worry about removing or uninstalling them. Those who want to uninstall sometimes are unaware of the right methods of uninstalling. If you are one of those then you can follow these steps to remove the programs in windows.

01. From 'Start' goto 'Programs' or 'All programs' and then place your mouse over the application that you want to uninstall. In that program group, there will be an icon for 'Uninstall'. Click on this 'Uninstall' icon to which will run automatically and remove all the related files from your computer.

02. From 'Start' goto 'Settings' and click on 'Control Panel'. In the 'control panel' look for the icon named 'Add/Remove programs' to open the add/remove programs window. In this window, there will be a list of all the applications that can be uninstalled. From this list select the program that you want to uninstall and then click on the 'Uninstall' button at the bottom.

03. Some applications may not have the above two options and therefore cannot be uninstalled or removed using the above two options. For such programs, open the 'Windows explorer' and look for the folder that contains the program you want to uninstall, then 'Delete' the whole folder. But remember, deleting the folder maynot remove the application fully as some of the related files maybe in some other system folders.

04. Another method is to use third party utility such as 'Spring cleaning'. Such utilities are mainly used to remove unused applications.

Note: While uninstalling applications, there maybe a popup window saying that some of the files are shared by other application and asking you to confirm whether you want to delete them. Such files are usually (.DLL) files and if you are not sure then it is safe to leave these dll files.

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