Which Uninstall Application is the Safest, Most Thorough, and Best for You? CleanSweep 4.0 Douglas Smith
With a robust feature set and polished interface, Quarterdeck's CleanSweep 4.0 is a mature and reliable product. However, on our tests, we found CleanSweep to be a little too aggressive at times, and the program is best suited for those who know their way around Windows.
The latest version of CleanSweep ($40 street) offers unobtrusive background monitoring of installations and thorough and reversible uninstallations of any application or folder, whether or not it monitored the original installation. In addition to its wizard-driven uninstall module, CleanSweep includes file cleanup modules that range from an intelligent Registry editor with a search-and-replace feature to file finders that weed out redundant and duplicate files.
The program effectively moves files between drives and--if you have a copy of the program on both systems--between two separate computers. A new SafetySweep feature prevents you from deleting necessary files. But while the program's dialogs and manuals lead you to believe that SafetySweep will block deletion of any files marked in yellow, the feature works only in the miscellaneous file-cleanup modules, not in the uninstall module. This could lead to confusion or even the loss of critical files.
CleanSweep's scan is one of the fastest among the uninstall programs. The background installation monitor that CleanSweep adds to your startup group is the best and least obtrusive among all of the uninstall utilities we tested. Options for cleaning up miscellaneous files aren't as extensive as those in UnInstaller 4.5, but Cleansweep does come with a utility that will clean out those files that your browser creates each time you surf the net. Another minor flaw is the program's inability to move the DLLs that it tells you should be moved. Quarterdeck will fix this with a patch file on its Web site.
Overall, CleanSweep remains a powerful uninstall package, but you may be better off with a more conservative program.
CleanSweep 4.0 Street price: $40 Requires: 486-based PC or better; 8MB RAM (16 for Windows NT), 10MB hard disk space; Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows NT http://www.quarterdeck.com
