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Uninstalling Applications Completely with Reg Organizer

October 29, 2010 (updated 4 years ago) by Chemtable Software

How many programs are installed on your computer? Most likely you have plenty of them. And these are only the main ones. There are also trial versions that you install for evaluation. When a new program is installed in the file system, new files and records are added to the registry. After uninstalling trials and demos, some data is left in the registry to make it impossible for the user to install a demo version again.

Is it possible to avoid accumulation of junk data on your computer? Yes. It is possible if you track all changes made during the installation process and roll them back when software is uninstalled. Reg Organizer uses almost the same approach to uninstall applications, without leaving any data behind.

The program detects changes made by installed applications by comparing the system state before and after a software installation. For this, it is necessary to make two snapshots of the system. The first snapshot is made before installing an application, and the second is made after installation and first launch of the program. Then these snapshots are compared, and all system changes made during the installation are detected. As a result of a comparison, the program creates the so-called change log. Now, if you want to uninstall the application, Reg Organizer uses the change log to roll back all changes made to the system on installing that program.

To create snapshots, the program saves information about the following components of the system:

– File system. The program saves information about all files and folders on disks, size and data of each file.
– System registry. The program saves the entire registry: keys, parameters and values (except duplicate keys).
– System files. The program saves system files such as win.ini и system.ini.

Installation of an application with Reg Organizer consists of several steps. Firstly, the program saves the current state of the system (therefore it’s not recommended to run other applications that can make changes to the registry or file system during the installation of a program). Secondly, a program is installed. At this point, Reg Organizer may be closed, and when the installation finishes, you can restart the computer (if necessary).

Once installed, it is necessary to run the program at least once before analyzing changes. If Reg Organizer was closed earlier, you need to finish the creation of the change log for the installation. For this, restart Reg Organizer, click the Tools menu, and select Applications Uninstaller. On the dialog that opens, click the Install an Application button.

Reg Organizer will inform you that there is an incomplete installation and prompt you to continue.

Finally the program creates a snapshot of the system after installing the application and compares it with the snapshot created before the installation. After a comparison, the program opens the window where you can rename the change log (most often its name is the same as the name of the installed application). Here you can also review all changes made to the system during the installation. However even for small applications the tree of changes can be too large and complex for analysis.

You can uninstall an application using the Uninstall an Application button only if you created the change log earlier using the Install an Application feature of Reg Organizer.

There are two ways to uninstall programs:

– Full uninstall when Reg Organizer rolls back all changes stored in the change log
– Restoration of the registry when Reg Organizer restores only the registry leaving the file system and configuration files unchanged.

By default the change log is removed when its changes are cancelled. The option labeled Do Not Delete Log after Cancelling Changes allows you to store the log even after the changes were cancelled.

You can create a log of the system state for other purposes too. For example, you can use this function to track changes made to the system when a certain process, or application is running. For this, you need to create a log before and after the launch of a process or application, and then use the program to detect differences between them. You can create as many snapshots of the system state as you want.