One contrast between the two operating systems was one that surprised me at first. At work, there were some Windows machines in the main teacher area (it was a teacher office at a building I usually didn’t work at). I wanted to install a specific application on one of the machines to do a task requested of me by the office staff. But when one of the teachers based in that office found out I was installing an app on one of their machines, he nearly exploded, and told me never to install apps on the machines without asking first. At the time, I didn’t understand why he was so upset; after all, you can just uninstall later, right? But he insisted that one stray app could screw up other stuff–and he was right. I was just too used to the Mac way of doing things.

Recently I was trying to cut down on some of the bloat on my Windows box, so I went to the Install/Uninstall control panel, looked through the list, found several apps that I never used any more, and uninstalled them. The uninstall program obligingly did away with them, occasionally asking me if I wanted to delete shared resources; each time I said “no,” not wanting to screw up anything else on the machine. But of course, it did. Though none of the apps I deleted had anything to do with browsing or even the Internet, my copy of Mozilla promptly developed an incredibly annoying bug: every time I opened up a web page, an error message appeared, telling me that a .dll file could not be accessed. Despite this, the pages I went to all loaded fully, so as far as I could tell, the missing file probably wouldn’t affect my browsing. But the error messages persisted, and if I tried to close them, they would continue popping up immediately after I closed the last one, and would continue to do so as long as any page was loading.

As the error message suggested re-installing Mozilla, that’s what I did. I uninstalled, and then re-installed the app. No luck–the error dialog boxes kept on coming. As far as I can tell, I’ll have to wipe the hard drive clean and re-install everything before I can use Mozilla again. Fortunately, Firefox still works, so I can use that in the meantime. But what a pain.

What’s worse, the Windows uninstall app doesn’t always do the job. Sometimes it just doesn’t work when you try it. Other times it will say it worked, but when you go to the Program Files folder, you’ll still see a folder for the app with some files remaining. And, as I described above, sometimes it will remove resources and files used by or affecting other applications, even when you specify not to disturb shared resources. A damned ugly system, inconvenient and annoying.

On the Mac, it’s pretty simple: to uninstall a program, just drag the app or its enclosing folder into the trash, and empty the trash. Bam, you’re done. But doesn’t that leave files behind? Yes, but they’re usually so small that they don’t take up much disk space, and they don’t interfere with other apps. Furthermore, if you ever decide to reinstall the app you removed, all your preferences and registration info are still in place. And if you really want to get rid of the whole thing, just go to the Library folders and remove any specific files or folders in the Preference or Application Support folders; no big deal. And you never have to worry about one app’s removal screwing up something else.