Installers: what are they and what do they do?

Not many applications are usable work immediately after you copy them onto your HDD. A lof of them require you to create an installation by means of a software installer.

A lot of applications are distributed in a packed form.

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

If you work with Windows operation system, you can use Microsoft Windows Installer that lets programmers making install with ease.

There are a number of other commercial installation software solutions you can find for Windows XP: InstallShield, Smart Install Maker and several others.

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

Not happy with commercial installation creator applications? There are also a couple of nice open source applications available. Check out Clickteam Install Creater and Innosetup, to name a couple.

A number of programmers choose to make their products work on different systems.

Programmers often find the job of making install packages for each of the platforms to be quite difficult.

Developers have to produce and test each installer for each platform.

The good news is, though, that you there exist anumber of cross-platform installation software programs.

For example, InstallAnywhere which is a commercial install creator, or an open source Java install maker for different systems named IzPack.

A software distribution bundle in most cases has to contain not only an install creator, but also an uninstaller.

In the past some applications did not have any uninstallers, so some 3rd-party uninstallers had to be used.

Third-party uninstallers are seldom used in such a way now, because they are often less efficient than built-in uninstallers.

Nonetheless third-party uninstallers have not disappeared just yet.

Many applications have functionalities that are not deleted by the built-in uninstall solution.

An additional trouble that such applications may help with is deleting Trojan and spyware.

If the application you have just installed appears to demonstrate some inadequate intentions, a third party uninstaller might prove to be the thing you need.

Uninstallers sometimes include some extra abilities such as handing cache memory and managing temporary files, and so on.