Your Uninstaller! 2003
Posted on: 12/10/2003 12:00 AM

As a systems admin, gamer and curious user, I tend to try out quite a bit of software in attempts to find utilities that will help me with my job, system performance or general use. After installing so many programs, systems begin to get cluttered and half the programs I try out, I never use or their trial runs out. Time to clean house!

Your Uninstaller! 2003 is an application that assists in the removal of applications from your system as well as offers some other general tweaks. At first glance it looks like nothing more than a fancy interface to the native windows Add/Remove control panel item. In fact, it basically is, but it claims to do a bit more than that.

The install was standard and easy allowing you to choose install location and icon placement. After the install, Your Uninstaller! will automatically check for updates to the software, which was the case when I installed it. It downloaded and installed the updated version without any problems.

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You have two choices when you start up Your Uninstaller! The only difference between the two modes is that the Pro mode allows you to modify the right click menu context for Internet Explorer, search and clean temp files and modify your start up items. I noticed when the program started up in the Pro mode was that it detected my screen savers as being newly installed since the program ran and marked them in red. This must be a glitch because the screen savers have been on my system since the day the operating system was installed.

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Your Uninstaller! lets you view the properties of the installed program including the registry keys that are currently used by the installed program. The screen doesn’t allow you to widen it so you have to put your cursor in the box to read the whole string. This was only a minor usability issue. When you select a program to uninstall , Your Uninstaller! starts that programs’ uninstall program. When it is done it does a further deep scan to make sure the keys are removed from the registry. How deep it cleans is not fully known, though it appears to clean the superficial registry entries that are not buried in the registry so far that you can’t find them or understand them when/if you do.

I did notice that Your Uninstaller! only removed the keys and some root entries were left. I don’t find this clean. Either it removes everything or it doesn’t and leaving ANY entries behind, whether they contain key values or not is not considered “removing all entries”. This is just wasteful and makes for a cluttered registry.

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If you have a program that just won’t uninstall, Your Uninstaller! will take care of this for you. You are prompted that the uninstall failed and it asks if you want to clean it up.
I tried to uninstall a program that I deleted (Shogun Total War) and one that I did not (Medal Of Honor demo). The MOH demo uninstall went smoothly leaving only the root entry folder in the registry, but the Shogun Total War uninstall met with an error.
Thankfully, you can right click on any item and force the uninstall. Again, any superficial entry for Shogun Total War was removed except for the root entry.

Your Uninstaller! does a good job of cleaning programs out that are “stuck” in there due to a missing uninstall file but the fact that it claims to remove everything and yet leaves clutter behind defeats the purpose of removing registry entries. The extra utilities it has for the context menu and temp file cleaning are nice but do not redeem Your Uninstaller! From failing to do a complete job. If you’re hung up about clutter in the registry, you may want to steer clear as a more thorough registry cleaner may be needed to clean up Your Uninstaller's clean up. If you don’t mind empty root entries left behind and are only concerned with dumping troublesome programs, then give it a shot as it does this nicely.

Score:&nbsp; (3.5 of 5)Stars

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