As time goes by, you will probably accumulate more and more programs on your computer. Some programs you’ll use often, and they will be part of your day to day activities. Other programs, however, may have been used once and then forgotten.
Many people download 60 day trial versions of software, use them for the trial period and then decide not to buy the fully fledged product. These programs take up space on your computer and clog up your system. It’s best to get rid of programs like these if you know you’ll never use them.
To uninstall a program from Windows 7, click Start > Control Panel > Programs (Uninstall a program).
The Programs and Features window that opens up displays a list of programs that currently exist on your system. It’s a useful panel that tells you who published the program and when it was installed on your computer. An even more useful nugget of information, especially given that your task is to find programs you haven’t used in a while, is “last used date”. Unfortunately, though you are able to add this column to the panel, it doesn’t work! For those morbidly curious to see how to add a seemingly useful column that doesn’t actually work, do the following: right click on one of the column headings and select More.
Make sure that the “Last Used On” box is checked and click OK. You can then see this useless column displayed in the window.
Uninstalling A Program
When you find a program that you want to remove from your system, click on it to select it and then click Uninstall at the top.
You will usually see a confirmation window displayed that requires you to confirm that you really do want to uninstall the program. Sometimes these confirmation windows include checks to make sure that you don’t have certain other programs open that prevent the uninstall from being performed. For example, when I try to uninstall Adobe Flash CS5, I get the an error message telling me that I need to close down Internet Explorer and Firefox in order for the uninstall to continue. If you get error messages like these, close down the offending programs and continue with the uninstall.
Some programs take longer than others to uninstall. Adobe Flash takes an absolute age! Once the program has been uninstalled, it will no longer appear in the program list. Sometimes a reboot of your computer is necessary to complete the uninstall.