[Windows Only]

Many years ago, I ran into some software from Comodo and I was impressed with its quality. To this day, Comodo continues to offer free system and security software that competes quite well with software you’d have to pay for. Recently, I saw something called Comodo Program Managerand I decided to give it a try.

I wasn’t sure what this program manager was supposed to do, but this brief quote from their site gave me a pretty good idea.

CPM is capable of purging all traces of an application from your computer – even those stubborn programs that appear impossible to completely remove. It’s monitoring functionality keeps track of the sometimes intricate and obscure changes that are made during the installation and usage of a program. When you uninstall using CPM, it’s as though the software was never there in the first place.

Comodo Program Manager (or CPM) is designed to be a replacement for the Add/Remove applet in Windows Control Panel. It not only replaces Add/Remove, it also allows you to monitornew applications as you install them in Windows. The monitoring process tracks all system and file changes made by a new program as it installs. This makes it easier to completely remove a program, unlike the standard Add/Remove which relies on the uninstall utilities that are provided with most programs.

CPM requires a reboot after installing, because it installs a Windows service that runs in the background. You may not be crazy about programs that need to run continuously in the background, however, that can be justified if you find that CPM is worth keeping.

On starting Comodo Program Manager from the Start Menu, you’ll see that it manages software in four groups; Programs, Drivers and Services, Windows Featuresand Windows Updates.

For a power user, like myself, I think it’s a great idea to have all of these options in one place. For newbies, it’s a little scary to think that CPM actually lets you mess with Drivers, Services, Features and Updates, so I recommend good backups and some caution if you need to do anything other than remove the normal programs on your PC. Fortunately, CPM usually lets you restore programs that you’ve removed, so it’s possible to undo any mistakes you might make.

Here’s what the Programs section looks like:

When you click on a program, you will typically be offered a chance to use the Standard Uninstalloption.

In order to monitora program while you are installing it, you’ll need to right click on the setup file and choose CPM to monitor it.

If a program was monitored by CPM when it was installed, you’ll get the option to do a Complete Uninstalland to also make a backup of the program using the Make Installerbutton.

The Make Installeroption creates an executable self-extracting archive of the program with all of it’s files and registry settings intact. That’s a handy feature, but I’m not sure how often I’d use it.

Download Comodo Program Manager

Techie Buzz Verdict:

CPM has more features than some of the other uninstall programs I’ve used before. The only thing I didn’t like was the fact that it needs to have a Windows service running constantly in the background. That said, I highly recommend this software, but only for those who are quite familiar with Windows and it’s problems. It’s not for newbies.