I
was recently visiting my family, and found that my father’s computer booted
extremely slowly. Upon examination of his installed programs, I found all sorts
of applications that he didn’t even know he had, many of which started up as
his computer booted. I laboriously uninstalled what I could figure out, but
there must be a better way. How do you uninstall a bunch of programs from a
Windows computer?
Ken recently had this happen, as
well, on a friend’s computer. In his case, the friend’s computer took over 45
minutes to boot up! It took hours to remove all the malware (often called
“crapware”) that had gotten installed on the computer. After many reboots, the
computer finally worked as intended. How does all this stuff get installed?
Often, people just click on anything on a Web site, and this action grants
permission to install an application, even if it’s unwanted. Other Web sites
exploit flaws in the operating system to simply install applications without
even asking—we call these “fly-by installs”, because they happen without your
knowledge.
Sometimes, it’s simply easier to
reinstall Windows than to deal with the thicket of crapware, but that, too, is
a big job best left to a professional. Another alternative is to make use of
one of our favorite tools, CCleaner (short for “Crap Cleaner”). This free tool
has a bunch of useful features, including displaying information about which
applications run at startup, and the providing a means of uninstalling one or
more applications relatively painlessly. And did we mention that it’s free?
Check out CCleaner here: https://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER. You can use the
free version, and if you like the tool, you can let the vendor know by
purchasing the professional version. You can download a version for Windows or
Mac (the Windows version is slightly more mature than the Mac version, but
they’re both helpful). CCleaner has been used by millions of Windows users for
many users, and we highly recommend it!
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