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-UE
The problem with "officially" installing software
By this I mean using an installer which will register your program in the registry, create shortcuts from the Start Menu and/or Desktop and/or Quick Launch, put it in your list of installed programs and stuff. And I'm speaking about Windows, but I presume the process has to be similar in other operating systems.
My old computer has a folder full of games. My dad currently uses this computer. He wants more space. I can free up 50 gigabytes of space immediately by simply navigating to the games folder's containing folder, highlighting the games folder, pressing shift+del, and clicking "yes".
BUT...that will break a ton of shortcuts and other associated pieces of data all over the place. And might even make uninstalling the software impossible until I reinstall it just to put the uninstaller back in the right place.
Why can't I just install programs by decompressing their archive files and sticking the result in a desired location in my filesystem?
Comments
Computers are complicated.
This is essentially how you install new programs in OS X without using the Mac App Store. Just throwing this out there.
Go to add/remove programs. It'll usually have access to the program's uninstall functions if you can't find them.
^ Which still doesn't work in one of the scenarios Glenn described above:
This always bugged me too, especially because many uninstallers don't properly clean up after themselves and leave stray files or registry keys behind.
I always liked that. Plain and simple.
Of course, the designers of OS X (or rather, NeXTSTEP) had the luxury of starting from scratch, whereas modern MS Windows is built on Windows NT which was built as a backwards-compatible replacement for 16-bit Windows which was built on top of MS-DOS. All those "made sense at the time" decisions start to build up after 20 years or so.![:\](/forums/resources/emoji/confused.png ":\")
^ Actually I think I've found that Windows 7 is more forgiving regarding that. At the very least it'll say "We can't find the uninstaller; wanna just remove this entry from the programs list?"
But yeah, I'll admit that some programs do have more than just "double-click-to-run", and benefit from more OS integration. Things like Virtual Clone Drive, for example.
FYI the other problem I ran into was this:
> attempt to uninstall Zombie Shooter
> it tries to start Steam
> Steam starts downloading piles of updates
> stop it in mid-download because it'll attempt to sign onto Steam and I'm already signed onto Steam from another computer
> uninstall does not happen
Oh, c'mon, why does it require Steam to uninstall???
you could use a third-party uninstaller?
...wouldn't that be swallowing a spider to catch a fly?
Eh. CCleaner is pretty palatable as far as spiders go, but uninstallation isn't precisely what you use it for. It tends to catch leftover files from a messy uninstall as a side effect though.