Clean Up Week: Scan for Leftovers

For those who saw the title of today's tip and thought I would teach you how to find leftover food, you will be disappointed!  While leftover food might make for an easy meal, one place you do not want leftovers is on your computer.  Unfortunately, that is exactly what most programs leave when you uninstall them using the built-in uninstaller.

When you install a program, it will copy files onto your hard drive and make entries in your Windows registry.  (A complete discussion of the registry is best left for another tip, but it is one of the major forces behind the scenes that makes your computer to run properly.)  When you uninstall it, you would think that it would undo each of the changes to the registry and delete each of the files it added to your hard drive.  However, this is not the case.  Very often, a program will leave files and registry entries behind.  Not only will these take up valuable space on your computer, but they create additional information Windows has to sort through (especially in the case of registry entries).

Fortunately, there is a way to scan for some of these files and registry entries.  Revo Uninstaller will display a list of the programs you have installed (using the Windows list we learned about yesterday).  When you choose to uninstall a program, it will launch the program's standard uninstaller, and then it will conduct its own scan of your files and registry for leftovers.  When it displays its results, you can choose what you want to delete or leave.  There are instances where you might want the leftovers, such as if you are uninstalling a program because it stopped working and you want to leave your user configuration file on the computer.

Revo Uninstaller has a free version and a paid pro version, which you can try out free for 30 days.  Unless you think you might use the pro version, I recommend you just download the free version.  The pro version comes with some additional features, but in tomorrow's tip, I will introduce you to another program that can do much of that for free!