11

Jan

Installers: what are they and what do they do?

Posted by admin  Published in Hardware & Software

Only few solutions can work immediately after you copy them onto your HDD. The majority require you to make an installation by means of a software installer.

The majority of programs you come across nowadays are published as a distributive.

For programmers there are ample possibilities to make their releases more effective using commercial or freely distributed application installer.

For those who work with Windows system, there is a popular solution called Microsoft Windows Installer that helps developers making install with ease.

There are a lot of other commercial installation software programs you can find for Windows XP: InstallShield, Smart Install Maker and some others.

All of them could create the so-called packages that can let you install software on any Windows system.

Not happy with commercial installer creator applications? Those who prefer open source solutions may have a look at Innosetup and a couple more applications that may be obtained freely.

Many software programs nowadays are developed for more than 1 system.

It is often quite a hard job to create various installation setups for several different systems.

Developers have to develop and assure the quality of each installer, be it for Linux, Mac OS or Windows XP.

Luckily, there are also cross-system install maker solutions.

For instance, InstallAnywhere that is a commercial setup creator, or an open source Java install generator for various platforms named IzPack.

A software distribution bundle usually has to feature not only an install creator, but also an uninstaller.

In the past some solutions did not have any uninstallers, so some third-party uninstallers were to be used.

However, these days a lot of software programs possess solid uninstallers, so you do not have to think a lot about obtaining some other application to delete things off your computer.

But third-party uninstallers have not vanished just yet.

Many applications have features that are not erased by the built-in uninstall program.

One more trouble that such solutions can help with is erasing Trojan and spyware.

Such a application will not erase itself voluntarily, so some assistance from a dedicated uninstaller could be needed.

If you care to find a better way to supervise cache memory or temporary data uninstallers may also be of use.