Free up disk space by uninstalling unwanted software with Should I Remove It?

When you’re looking to improve your PC’s speed and stability then there are plenty of actions you might take, but one of the most effective is often just to uninstall any applications, add-ons and extras which you don’t really need. You’ll free up plenty of system resources, and that alone could help to deliver a real performance boost.

You’ll have to figure out exactly which programs you need to keep, though, and which can be safely uninstalled, and that can be a challenge if you’ve hundreds of apps to explore. Don’t worry, though, because Should I Remove It? is here to help: just download the program, the authors say, "and within seconds we will help you purge your PC".

As Should I Remove It? is all about reducing clutter, it was good to see the program come in the form of a very small download (1.16MB), which doesn’t include any adware itself. Installation is quick and easy, and within a moment or two we were looking at a list of our installed applications.

The program displays software in the order in which it’s removed by other program users, with the most-often-dumped at the top. Presumably the theory here is that if everyone else is uninstalling it, then perhaps you should consider doing so, too -- but we’re not sure this logic really holds, especially when we looked at the list on our test PC. Was uTorrent really the program most worthy of uninstalling on our system, for instance? Does it really make sense that a program as useful as 7-Zip should appear in 4th place, or that Freemake Video Converter and Downloader would follow immediately afterwards?

If we scrolled to the bottom of the list, then, to find the programs most rarely removed, would that tell us anything more helpful? No, not really -- the app with the lowest removal rating on our system was the "Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Sample Browser". And we’d hazard a guess that’s just because hardly anyone else has ever installed it.

The opening program list doesn’t tell you much useful, then, but fortunately Should I Remove It? has another useful trick. When you scroll through your applications you may find some you don’t recognize, or otherwise decide you’d like more information about them. And if you click that app, and select "What is it?", Should I Remove It? will open a web page which tells you more.

Launch the page for Orbit Downloader, say, and you’ll see a basic description of the program’s functionality, and a link to the developer. There are key program details, including the installation folder, uninstaller location, and files installed by the program, as well as their purpose (so for example you’ll read that "orbitnet.exe" is the Orbit P2P service).

The "Behaviors exhibited" information then explains more about what the program does on your system. Which in Orbit’s case means installing a couple of IE extensions (listed here with the file names and ClassID), as well as adding a couple of Windows Firewall exceptions.

And there’s even more, including the Windows versions it runs on, the rating given to the program by other users, the PC manufacturers who install it, and the list goes on.

Should I Remove It? can’t immediately tell you which programs to keep, and which to uninstall, then. But it can help you in your own research by providing a great deal of useful information about your installed applications. And because it’s so small and hassle-free itself, the program will probably make a good addition to most PCs.

Photo Credit: Pavel Ignatov/Shutterstock

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