Revo Uninstaller Review
Written by John Thompson on September 5, 2011 · Filed under Review, Software
Reviewing so many products across different platforms, I’m constantly installing new software on to my Windows based computers to try out new things. Sometimes, I’ll keep a product that we review on Zath, but a lot of the time I will probably uninstall it after I’ve used it. The only problem is that when you uninstall a program on Windows, a lot of crap gets left behind. Registry entries, stray folders and dead shortcuts are left scattered across your hard drive.
If you want to fully uninstall a program, along with all of its registry entries and hidden folders, you will have to use something that carries a little more weight than the Control Panel. Something like Revo Uninstaller.
Although there is also a ‘Pro’ edition, Revo Uninstaller is free to download and free to use. It will scan your hard drive and find all of the programs that you currently have installed, listing them in a grid and allowing you to fully uninstall any that you don’t want.
The download of Revo Uninstaller is just a couple of megabytes in size, and it installed on our test machine in a few seconds. The interface of the main window is really simple, putting the main focus on your applications which are currently installed. On the top of the window, you can select the different modes that the program has to offer. By default, you’re in ‘Uninstaller’ mode, although you can easily switch to ‘Tools’ and enter ‘Hunter Mode’ all from the main window.
When you’re in hunter mode, the program will live in your taskbar and allow you to drop a program on the icon to uninstall. If you would rather only have it running when you need to use it though, you can uninstall programs just as easily from the main window.
When you’re in uninstaller mode, you can select any of the applications within the window, and then click the ‘Uninstall’ button on the toolbar at the top. You are then asked to choose an uninstall mode, and can choose from four different methods: built-in, safe, moderate and advanced. Each mode is more thorough than the last, so advanced will take the longest amount of time, but it will also detect as many leftovers as possible, finding all left over information in the registry and on the hard drive, too.
Each time a program is uninstalled, a System Restore point is created, and the program’s own uninstaller is launched. Once this is completed, Revo Uninstaller will then proceed to find any leftover data that it can clean up. The whole process is fairly thorough, although it does require a bit more user interaction than most other programs that do a similar job, such as CCleaner or CleanMyPC, which is a lot more automated than Revo. Having said that, if you want to get your hands on CleanMyPC you will have to cough up £11.99 for the privilege, and you’re getting Revo for free.
If you do want to try out Revo Uninstaller for yourself, you can download it from the official website for free. The Pro version, with more features, will put you back $39.25 for one computer.
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