How often you are stuck with a incomplete uninstall of your security products whether its a antivirus or Internet security regardless of the developer of the product? Most of the time we are stuck with some traces the product and sometime even, these security applications refuse to uninstall. Even though most of the security vendors like Mcafee, Norton, Kaspersky etc provide a dedicated standalone remover for their product, still you need to download them for each product you use or test.
AppRemover is a great application which solves this problem without any hassles. We have talked about Revo uninstaller in the past which does the un-installation for almost any application. But AppRemover is specifically developed for Security application and it works. This is a standalone product which means you need not install this application. You can carry it in your removable drive and run it wherever you want.
Developer Description:
The free AppRemover utility enables the thorough uninstallation of security applications like antivirus and antispyware from your computer. Remove computer stress. Simply, cleanly and effectively.
It supports a whole lot of security applications like avast!, AVG, Avira, Kaspersky, McAfee, Norton, Symantec, Trend Micro and many more. Also, support ranges from Windows XP to Windows 7 including both 32 bit and 64 bit of operating systems.
I tested it with some of security applications which were refusing to get uninstalled using their conventional uninstaller including beta version of a recently released Antivirus product.
It scans your system for any security product that is installed or had left over its traces even after you have removed them. It gives you two options of either removing a security application or clean up a failed uninstall.
You need to just select the security application detected on your system and click next to remove that product. It will do the uninstall without any problems.
I was able to even uninstall password protected Mcafee enterprise version on my system which was impossible to uninstall unless I provided the password but AppRemover was able to uninstall it without even asking for a password.
September 23, 2010 @ 9:24 PM
Thanks Avinash for this posting as I have several left overs from Security Suites that I have tried recently.Was just asking Ashwin about this the other day why my computer said I still had Avira as a firewall when it was deleated sometime ago. I will have to try this out later today and see what happens.
September 23, 2010 @ 11:13 PM
Hopefully, it will be able to remove all traces of leftover security apps. Its a great application to remove these kind of stuff.
September 24, 2010 @ 6:03 AM
Well I tried it and it said there was nothing on my computer to clean.
September 30, 2010 @ 10:53 AM
It doesnt work for many security apps, I am guessing it just runs the apps default uninstaller. Removal of registry keys doesnt work well
September 30, 2010 @ 11:10 AM
It worked for every security app I tested and It doesn’t run the apps default uninstaller. If that would have been the case, I wont have been able to uninstall Mcafee enterprise virus scan with a admin password. It is impossible to uninstall that without that password but Appremover did that without even prompting for any password.
September 30, 2010 @ 11:19 AM
Well, I am glad to hear Appremover worked for you. I found remnants in the registry “Avira and Zonelabs” when I used it to detect failed security apps uninstall, it did not remove them. Registry cleaners dont remove those keys either. Hope the Appremover developers find some way to remove invalid registry and support more security apps, especially those which dont have uninstaller tools
September 30, 2010 @ 11:30 AM
Well, Regarding registry keys you may be right. Here I am quoting from FAQ page.
” I finished uninstalling a security application, but there are still application files/folders/registry entries remaining on my computer. What should I do?”
“AppRemover may have given you a notice stating “Some files will only be deleted after you reboot”. In this case, before exiting AppRemover, please reboot your computer and check if the files or registry entries are still there. If security application files/registry entries still remain, please send an email to [email protected] and provide the following information:
Subject – Files left behind
– Security application name
– Security application vendor
– Security application version
– Name of files, folders and keys left behind “
December 11, 2012 @ 12:31 PM
Thanks for the tutorial, love it. very useful