Out, Damned Software! Cleaning Out The Weeds From Your Windows Garden

I tend to be hard on computers. Not the shiny little boxes — but the soft, squishy insides. My wife, who’s a network tech, says I can screw up a perfectly good ‘puter faster than anyone she knows. (And she spends all day working in a middle school with teenagers.) So I’ve pretty much resigned myself to having to “lather, rinse, repeat” my entire box about every two months. Windows gets sluggish, I watch the little hourglass, and the BSOD comes to visit me.

But I may have found salvation. I just ran across a little freeware app called Revo Unistaller and it’s pretty neat. It takes the place of the Windows “uninstall” function, but goes far beyond. It searches your registry and drive to find all those little tendrils that were left, and lets you snip them off and kill them dead. I’ve tried it on some stuff that was causing me grief, and it got them gone.

I also read (in a MS blog, of all places) that another little trick is recreate your profile:

• Back up everything
• Log off
• Log on as admin
• DELETE YOUR LOGIN (Danger, Will Robinson!)
• Recreate your login
• Enjoy

That will be the next one I try. Stay tuned.