Which Uninstall Application is the Safest, Most Thorough, and Best for You? Remove-It 98 Douglas Smith
Quarterdeck is in the odd position of marketing two competing uninstall utilities. Remove-It 3.0 ($40 street), which it acquired from Vertisoft, can't match CleanSweep's elegance and speed. But unlike CleanSweep, Remove-It can archive applications into self-installing files, so you can transfer applications to a computer that doesn't have Remove-It installed.
Remove-It's other features generally match those of CleanSweep, but its interface is tailored to non-expert users. Remove-It compiles a database of file links when you first install it, and it updates the database quickly each time you launch it. A background installation monitor pops up whenever you install a new application, and it records all changes to your hard disk and Windows Registry so you can remove the application thoroughly. You can undo all file removals at any time as long as you create compressed backups.
With Remove-It, you can perform an Express removal, which uninstalls applications or whole folders with a minimum of prompting, or a Custom removal, which lets you remove or retain individual items. The program tells you which keys it will remove from the Registry, but in some cases it combines all the Registry entries it proposes to remove into a single item.
A Cleanup Coach guides you through the process of removing unneeded and duplicate files. Many of these files are marked with yellow caution signs, and you can't set an option (like CleanSweep's SafetySweep) that makes it impossible to remove these files--some of which are essential to printing, faxing, dialing, and other Windows functions. To see the version numbers of the files, you have to click on a View button.
The Clean-It module does an effective and generally cautious job of removing unneeded Registry entries; an .INI file editor lets you modify and remove individual lines but won't let you add anything.
Overall, Remove-It is a capable but unremarkable program. Its only true ace in the hole is its ability to create self-installing archives.
Remove-It 98 Street price: $40 Requires: 386-based PC or better, 8MB RAM, 4MB hard disk space, Microsoft Windows 95 http://www.quarterdeck.com
