This company (with its website: uninstallable.com) ranks software for how easy it is to uninstall, also giving the procedures to uninstall.

It helps you sue companies who's software caused you to reinstall your entire computer. I'm sure that they cannot legally hide behind a "terms of use" if they knew in advance that they are doing harm.

There's a lot of money in that - because sometimes its days of work, and irrecoverable lost data.

The website will probably be quite popular, with discussions of people's experience.

Babylon, CNet, Oracle's Java and others come to mind.
-- pashute, Jan 05 2014

Springs to mind Michael_20Corleone_...0security_20program
[zeno, Jan 05 2014]

ReactOS http://www.reactos.org
Windows with Micro$oft removed. [spidermother, Jan 06 2014]

And if there's no other choice, simply uninstall the company itself.
-- pashute, Jan 05 2014


Or you log on and select the program you want to get rid of and they remove it remotely.
-- zeno, Jan 05 2014


Yeah, right ... but who can you trust ?

Many geeks have a test pc which is triflingly easy to flatten and then rebuild from a disk image, just ready to have the latest release of invasive malware (a.k.a. Microshit hotfix) dropped onto it ... and if you're not a geek then it's basically hard luck - can't help you, Sundance ...
-- 8th of 7, Jan 05 2014


Can I remove Microsoft from Windows ?
-- FlyingToaster, Jan 05 2014


Yes. You wind up with OSX.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 05 2014


Linux, linux, linux...

Typing this on a thirty quid laptop bought at the recycle shop Hard Off, reanimated it with Puppy Linux.

Hard disk was DOA, so I took it out and threw it away. Running off a Puppy linux CD and USB memory sticks for data storage...works for me.
-- not_morrison_rm, Jan 05 2014


//Linux, linux, linux...//

I second OSX for the best of both worlds. Linux isn't what you'd call 'easy to use'.
-- DIYMatt, Jan 06 2014


It's incredibly easy to use, if by use you mean "You bastard, start working again!".

But seriously after the 2008 version of Ubuntu, it's ludicrously good and free.
-- not_morrison_rm, Jan 06 2014


but osx isnt exactly easy to program. grrr, been there.

And what zeno replied to Normzone on Springs-to- mind link (2nd anno)...
-- pashute, Jan 07 2014


//but osx isnt exactly easy to program.//

It's not that hard, really. Depending on what you want to do, it ranges from virtually no different from any other flavor of Unix (if you're sticking to command line stuff) to mind-numbingly tedious (GUI programming in Objective-C). But it's not really all that *difficult*, comparatively speaking.

Of course, I avoid Obj-C like the plague, so my language of choice is Ruby, which makes it considerably easier to get a full-fledged application built without too much effort. The big thing that I get stuck on is always GUI design and programming, though. I can conceive of how I want the program to work, and I know how to make it do what I want, but somehow I tend to lose interest and either leave out features because it's too much of a pain to create an interface for them, or I just half-ass it and repurpose UI elements for things they're not really supposed to be used for. The vast majority of software I write is solely for my own usage anyway, so it's not worth the time to do it correctly. But the point is, it wouldn't be hard to do so, just sometimes boring as all get-out.
-- ytk, Jan 07 2014



random, halfbakery