TAKE FULL CONTROL OF YOUR WINDOWS APPS
TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR APPS AND YOU TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR PC. ALEX COX EXPLAINS EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MANAGING YOUR INSTALLED CONTENT.
Applications — programs you run on your PC — are a constant. They’re always there. We all use them, and our machines would be dusty husks without them. But they do have a tendency to get a bit out of control, particularly if a system has existed for a long time.
An application almost always consists of a bunch of files; the more apps and games you have installed, the more files exist on your hard drive. This isn’t, in itself, a problem, until your drive is filled with ten thousand chunks of goodnessknows-what, and a single search operation takes half an hour because Windows has decided it must meticulously inspect every single thing.
Here’s a quiz for you: What was the last program you installed, and where is it on your hard drive? We’d wager that, in the first count, you’re probably not sure, and in the second, you hammered through the process, let it ensconce itself in goodness-knows-what folder, and have absolutely no idea what other things it scattered over your hard disk.
Going with the flow of program installation is normal and entirely understandable, but it’s not difficult or onerous to get yourself organised, and a well-sorted PC will stand you in good stead for continued use. Unless you use extreme methods, you won’t ever be able to stop the miasma of random files seeping through your PC. But we’ll show you how to seek them out, and how to remove unwanted programs entirely. We’ll even show you new ways of installing software that make it easier to manage, update, and uninstall when you’re ready. And if the thought of installing software is giving you some form of filesystem OCD, we can teach you how to make your own portable apps that don’t need installing in the first place, or how to integrate your favorite apps into a custom build of Windows 10 that starts a clean PC exactly the way you want it.
WHAT IS INSTALLING?
Once upon a time — and we’re going back some 20 years here — getting a program up and running involved little more than placing a few files in a folder on your PC. That’s all an installer did. Don’t have the right drivers? Tough luck. Find them yourself. Operating system not up to scratch? Go through all the hassle first, and you’ll find out that something’s wrong when you try to run your application. A dark time, but one with benefits: Removing a program folder meant, usually, erasing all trace of that software. A simple scheme from a time when, however bleak things might have been, operating systems were less complex and software depended on little.
Try manually excising a bit of software now, and you’ll not have a good time; the typical modern installer is responsible for more tasks, and spreads the software much wider, and uninstallers are required to scrape off the remains of redundant apps. The installer decompresses large files, which have been archived to ensure an efficient distribution size. It determines whether you’re installing from scratch or upgrading. It places references to program variables in the Windows registry, and configures other files to suit your hardware and personal preferences. It downloads, or upgrades, software dependencies — drivers and software frameworks that the program being installed may depend upon to run. And it does even more besides.
To make things even more complex, there’s not one kind of installation package, though this won’t make a huge difference to the average user. You most regularly come across executables (EXE files), which tend to use some kind of third-party program to get the job done, or Microsoft Installer (MSI) files, which do the same thing using Windows’ built-in installation components. Others — the likes of CUB, MSP and MSM — also use the Windows Installer and are meant for patching or modifying components. You don’t see them often while using Windows on the desktop, if at all, although those who stray into server territory might get more familiar.
For all we’ve said, a complex installation method isn’t strictly required for every app. Many apps have been designed to run in a so-called “portable” configuration, where their content is contained in a single folder and requires no installation whatsoever. While these are few and far between — portable apps are usually small tools, although programs such as LibreOffice are also available in a non-installed format — they’re perfect if you want to carry around a toolkit of apps on a USB stick. And you
can even make your own, in a roundabout way; see Create Portable Apps (back over the page).
We have no doubt that you’ve installed programs before. Taking you through the ins and outs of clicking ‘Next’ a few times in the course of a traditional software installation would be insulting your intelligence. But as you may have guessed by the extent of this feature, the standard way is not the only way of going about things. The regular way, perhaps, but not the best in all cases.
You may, for example, have grabbed some of the rare decent software from the Windows Store, Microsoft’s poorly-policed den of application iniquity. Whatever your feelings on its content, it has a number of advantages — Windows Store apps run in a sandboxed mode, isolated from the main OS, which means that even if something malicious slips through, it can’t attack your PC directly, and installing, removing and updating Store apps is quick and easy.
The technically-minded might avoid it, and there are other ways of sandboxing apps you might not know of (see ‘Sandboxing applications’ on page 71), but don’t underestimate its convenience. So that’s one alternative, but let’s explore some of the other ways of getting software on your PC.
BATCH MANAGEMENT
Sometimes, you’re starting entirely from scratch with a clean Windows installation that you need to get up to speed in a hurry. Problem is, deploying a new machine can be a massive slog of a job. Collecting together the items you need is one thing, but running through the individual installation processes of all that software is time-consuming and labour-intensive, particularly if you’re dealing with programs that include sneaky shovelware in their installers. One wrong click and you’re infested, meaning it’s not even a job you can do on autopilot. But there’s a tried and tested solution that has been dealing with all that nastiness for a number of years, and it’s even applicable if you’re not installing a machine from scratch.
Ninite ( www.ninite.com) compresses all that work into a single job, then deals with all the effort for you. It installs everything you need, preselected to your specifications, as long as it’s in the extensive list of supported software, without any hassle. Head over to the site, check a few boxes for your desired apps, and click the big button to download the installer. Run it, and Ninite automatically gets hold of the latest versions of your chosen free programs
— which range from security and development tools to messaging and creative apps — and installs them in the background. They all end up in their default locations, and Ninite also ensures that those clandestine crapware boxes are never clicked. While you can’t use it for automatic uninstallation unless you opt for the pro version (US$20 a month, which also gets you the ability to perform network installs), it does support upgrading; an occasional run is all it takes to keep all of the applications on your system up to date.
PACKAGE MANAGEMENT
Although this feature is dealing with Windows, it would be a canny move to take a look at what the competition is up to. Most flavors of Linux are perfectly capable of installing software from files that have been directly downloaded — however, that’s not the usual method. Linux tends to rely on a disparate group of package managers, small tools that can download, install, update and remove software — thus dealing with both the hassle of finding it and installing anything else your machine might require to get it running.
Windows has been employing its own under-the-hood package manager for some time, a Powershell app called Package-Management, which is a fork of open-source downloader OneGet. It is bafflingly complex — mastering it is a task for another day, although if you’re intrigued enough to experiment, you can read more about it at bit.ly/2gstsvW. Better, we think, to start with something more user-friendly and sweet.
Chocolatey is the delicious-sounding Windows analog to Linux tools such as ‘apt-get’, ‘yum’ and ‘pacman’, and it works in much the same way. Microsoft even uses its framework (which spawned from open-source app NuGet, just to add to the complexity of the software management family tree) as part of Package-Management, which is a ringing endorsement. To get the command-line version installed, open up an administrative command prompt by holding Shift, right-clicking the Start button, and selecting ‘Command Prompt (admin)’. Head over to www.chocolatey.org/install, then copy and paste the top install line into your command prompt. Let it run for a while, then close and reopen the window once the C:> prompt reappears.
The first thing to try is, we have to admit, a little recursive. Try typing:
choco upgrade chocolatey into a fresh command prompt, and you’ll see Chocolatey’s interface in action as it heads off to see whether there’s a new version of itself available. There won’t be, of course, because we’ve just installed it. But if there were, it would download and perform the upgrade autonomously. Let’s get hold of something a little more useful now:
choco install notepad-plus-plus -y
This grabs excellent text editor Notepad++ from the internet and safely ensconces it on your system, forgoing any standard Windows installer. The
-y part on the end of that command means you tacitly accept any confirmations that might come up during the install, so it happens in an automated manner. Replace install with upgrade or uninstall to perform those tasks, and check out the Chocolatey docs at www.chocolatey.org to find out more — there’s a huge number of ways to use it via the command line.
You may be more comfortable with a graphical version, however; use Chocolatey to install the package chocolatey-gui and, once it’s complete, you’ll find it in your Start menu as usual. It’s an easy interface through which you can manage the packages that you’ve installed on your system, and clicking the Chocolatey tab on the left leads you to the other applications you could have Chocolatey manage for you. The next time you need a piece of software, head to Chocolatey, type the name of the app in its search bar, and we’d wager it’ll be there.
SPACE MANAGEMENT
We’re spoiled by today’s enormous spinning drives and ever-growing SSDs. Space doesn’t tend to be an issue. But managing it really should be, both in terms of what’s there and where you’re putting it. Yes, Windows search
can dig things up quite readily, but despite Microsoft’s attempts to improve it, searching on NTFS drives is simply not a quick task. However, if your files are well, uh... filed, you may never need to do a Windows search again.
Consider, before you do anything rash, changing your default installation directory. By default, most applications you install either nestle in the Program Files or Program Files (x86) folders, splitting them up between those that run natively in 64-bit (the former) and those that don’t. Logically, this makes sense; practically, 64-bit Windows is now the mainstream, 32-bit applications are entirely compatible with 64-bit systems, and there’s no reason to split them apart in this way. It’s just confusing. But during each program installation (bar those of poorly-coded programs that rely on specific directories to run), you are given a choice as to where you install your software. Setting up your own folder structure — say, a Programs folder, with folders within labeled Music, Office and so on — is a great way both to neaten up your collection and find out what you have installed when the Start menu begins to get a bit unruly. It’s a five-minute manual job that will make life easier in the future.
Desktop Windows isn’t nice enough to offer folder quotas for files in the same way its server-focused skew does. Quotas, as you might expect, help control the amount that users are allowed to store. Restricting yourself in this manner is a great way to make sure you’re cleaning out the dead wood regularly — if you’re forced to make room every time you want to stick a new game or program on your system,
you like it or not. Copying files between partitions is also slower on spinning platter drives, due to the physical distance the read/write head needs to travel between the split areas of space.
You might think partitioning is something that can only be done to a clean system. That certainly is the easiest way to make it happen. As you run through the Windows installer, early on (if you don’t choose the ‘Upgrade’ option) you’re given the option of where to install Windows, at which point, you can also chop your disk up and format it as you see fit. We’d leave at least 32GB for Windows itself — if you’re running an SSD and a magnetic drive in parallel, use the SSD for the operating system. Doing it this early is beneficial both in terms of instilling an ethos of organisation to your system and for speed — Windows won’t need to shuffle itself around or be defragmented to make space for a new partition.
POST PARTITIONING
It’s likely, though, that you’re not going into this from scratch. And that’s OK; Windows’ own Disk Management tool (right-click the Start button, and select Disk Management) is all too happy to slice up the drives of any living system. Open it up, and you may see that what you thought was a simple drive actually consists of several partitions; we tried it on a laptop we had hanging around — one that had seen itself upgraded from Windows 8 to 8.1 to Windows 10 to the Anniversary Update — and found a host of recovery partitions and other empty space. It might be tempting, seeing this, to ditch this wasted space, but without knowing exactly what’s on each partition, we advise that you tread very carefully.
Find your main partition, or a partition you want to split, in the graphical representation. Right-click it, and select ‘Shrink partition’ to begin the operation of creating some empty space. It’s here that you’ll see just how much you’re allowed to shift; so-called ‘unmoveable’ files put a damper on this in a hurry, but this problem can often be sorted by (temporarily) disabling System Restore or running Disk Cleanup. You can shrink your main partition down to the individual megabyte, but be sure to leave a reasonable amount of space free on your Windows partition in order that it can accommodate system updates and virtual memory. Once the shrink operation is complete, create your new partition or partitions by rightclicking the now unallocated empty space, selecting ‘New simple volume’, and allocating your desired amount of space, repeating the process for each new partition you wish to create.
CLEANING UP
Where, oh where does the space go? An established system tends to eat up hard drive bytes rather mysteriously, and if you’re obsessive about watching your drive stats, you may be wondering what’s going on. We can’t tell you precisely, although there are a few obvious culprits to look for if you’re getting too low for that big app install.
First, and most prevalent, is System Restore points. These have the potential to be huge on their own, but if you’re doing frequent installs, your Windows system may be making loads of them, and keeping a needless archive. Disk Cleanup helps you delete all but the most recent. To find the option, open up an Explorer window, right-click your OS partition (or just your C: drive), select ‘Properties > Disk Cleanup > Clean Up System Files’, then head to the ‘More Options’ tab. Disk Cleanup can also clean up temporary files and the like, although you may not save a vast amount of space this way.
So where are the hogs? The best way to find out is to use a visual method, rather than poking through Windows Explorer poring over file sizes. For this, you have two primary choices — TreeSize Free ( www.jam-software.com/treesize_free) and WinDirStat ( windirstat.net). TreeSize feels very much like a natural extension of Windows Explorer. Install it, and it runs from a context menu; right-click a folder or drive, fire it up, and it very quickly trawls through and finds out exactly what’s inside, offering you the option of reopening as an administrator if any of your files are locked down. It then lists your folders by their size, with a handy bar graph indicator in the background. Drill down into the largest folders and you’ll find your files — you can right-click them for a standard Explorer context menu, but be careful not to delete anything you don’t explicitly know the meaning of.
WinDirStat is a similar tool, but infinitely cooler in that it ramps up the visual finery to a huge extent. Give it a run, select your drive (or ‘All local drives’ if you want to be unnecessarily thorough), then wait as it laboriously traverses your disk in search of meaty files — it’s certainly nowhere near as fast as TreeSize.
When it’s done, though, you’ll see the benefit: a colour-coded map of your entire drive, with rectangles representing the size of files, collected into larger rectangles that represent folders. Click a big file and check the status bar to see exactly what it is and right-click to find a context menu that will help you open the folder in Explorer or copy its path to your clipboard. Click a folder or file in the top left pane, and it highlights it in the
visual view, or use the top-right pane to hunt down files of particular types. They’re listed, by default, in order of the size those files take up, so it’s a good way to discover the space-munching culprits.
TIME TO UNINSTALL
Once you’ve found the monsters — or when you’re simply done with your apps — how do you remove them? You might be surprised, but we’re going to suggest that the best way to clean up an old app is by using Windows’ own built-in interface, which you can find in the ‘Programs and Features’ section of the Control Panel. Removing files using this tool automatically fires up their included uninstaller (or, in the case of MSI-installed components, the Windows built-in equivalent), which should mean all trace of the app is wiped away. Make sure, if using this method, that you remember to check any boxes that also remove settings files or equivalent because, while they’re not going to take up much space, any redundant files you leave on your drive slow down indexing and basically irritate you to no end.
If you’re a fan of overkill and salting the earth, try a tool such as IOBit Uninstaller ( www.iobit.com). It’s available as a portable app from portableapps.com (because if anything should be, it’s a tool that helps you get rid of installed software), and it’s a great way of making sure every trace of an app is removed. Set it to work, and it bangs through your registry and filesystem to find files traditional uninstallers might have missed. If a program doesn’t appear to be installed — as in, it doesn’t appear in ‘Programs and Features’ — you can also point IOBit Uninstaller at its executable file, and it does its best to do an automatic uninstall. It’s not flawless, but it’s pretty damn good.