At one point or another this
happens to every computer user in the world: You install a program, find out
that you don't like it, or need it, or that it's plain useless for the task you
wanted to use it for, and you want to uninstall it. So you open up the Windows
Add/Remove tool, click the button to uninstall the program... and find out that
you cannot uninstall the program. In this article I will try to explain how to
force uninstall a program, that you cannot uninstall using the Windows
Add/Remove tool. Before that, however, I will try to explain what happens
during installation.
So if a program won't uninstall, how do you perform a force uninstall?
Well, if you
know how to work with the windows registry, you probably can perform a manual
force uninstall.
Before I go into
detail about how to do this manually, I'd like to say that this is pretty
advanced stuff, and if you're not a power user, then perhaps you should
consider using specialized software such as the Perfect Uninstaller which allows you to do this in just a few clicks.
If you are a
power user, then let's continue. First, let's see how to remove the program
from the list of installed programs. To do that you need to open the registry
browser:
1. Click Start and
choose Run in the menu (If you're using Windows Vista then press Win+R on your
keyboard).
2. Type regedit and
hit Enter.
3. On the left side
is the registry settings tree, use it to go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
4. Inside that key
you'll find a lot of keys that belong to different programs. Some are named
after the program's name, others as a mix of numbers and letters that makes no
sense. Look through each of them until you find one that has the key
DisplayName (on the right) with your program's name in it.
5. Notice the key
UninstallString - this key points to the uninstall program, and the log file
usually resides in the same folder as that program.
6. If you delete
the key in which you've found the DisplayName key with the value equal to your
program's name, then your program won't appear on the Add/Remove programs list.
Some programs
create new entries in the registry to store their configuration options, these
entries can usually be found in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software or in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE - look for the program name or the name of the
company that made the software. Don't delete Microsoft though - that contains
Windows settings as well.
Next we have to
find all the files that have been copied. Open the folder in which the
uninstall program should be, and look for files which are named uninstal.log or
setup.log or something similar. The list of files that have been installed is
inside this file, you can open it in your notepad and find all of the files
that have been copied onto your system. Delete the files and you'll get rid of
the program almost fully.
Again, I'd like
to stress that if you're new to the windows registry and all of this stuff, and
if you don't feel like experimenting with your computer, then, again, please
consider using either the PerfectUninstaller or similar software, I do not want to be responsible for
breaking your computer.
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