[edit] typed on an iPhone if you can believe it with keyboard clicking turned off, (too much lag sometime at certain forums), and want to give a heads upbin case the grammars or spelling is atrocious. With clicking off it can make it even harder as if you are a fast Tyler you can tell when you miss a letter. [end edit]
Yes that's true. But astute windows users will also use a regitry program that will snap shot the registry and upon removing files it uses the same program to delete the files, putting the registry back to the prior mode or snapshot that it once was, pre-installation. Why msft can't come up with something like this is beyound me. My guess is that the hidden files that developers use for trial purposes, would make msft look like the bad guy if they came out with such a program. here are some though, via 3rd party, that will indeed do this. N
registry is very similar to .plist and .kext files and if you are the type of user that shuts down your computer every night, the daily, weekly, monthly scripts will not run.
In addtion I disagree with it not having the same affect as windowsi registry as I am a beta tester and content producer and over time, if you dint run programs such as Oynx for Maca and simply drag files to trash, the sutem will slow down over time. Ask anyone here, most users will tell you their system is not as fast as the first few weeks they got their system and we can all thank the developers for creating hidden files that sometime appzapper will miss. I wonder if there is an app that will snapshot your plist/kext/preferences/documents/package receipts like windows.
Anyway the point is due to trial software, developers don't trustv us. Then again you can run appzapper on some prframs and have a fresh trial to play with. Where the mac and pc really get into trouble is with high end pace or security that hides files and phones home and while I'm not a huge fan or warez as I have seen my material posted inalterable.binaries.music, until we live in a day where we can try software and say no thanks to get our money back, we will always have these so called hidden files, and as stated earlier, I will have to disagree as even macs skis down over time due to orphaned files vand am surprised that , besides time machine, there is no snapshot software that takes a pre instal picture so it can delete these hidden files that even Apzapper misses. It will all be done 100% when yiu can install then uninstall anything then reinstall with a message of " sorry your trial has expired" sadly this is neither a msft or Apple problem, yet at the same time, both comanies could develop a program that catches all files. This way we would never duffer the slowing down of our computer. Of course we haven't even begun talking about harddrive sectors where the fastest portion of the hard drive is certain places. On the PC side there are programs that will defray most used apps to the fastest sectors if the drive.
So much to talk about, so many, many things each comany could do to keep our systems running fresh and new at all times if they weren't si afraid if the developers.
Peace.
It isn't important or really advantageous to remove such files in OS X.
Using App Zapper (et al) religiously over the course of a year could get you back as much as 1-2MB of space.
It really isn't necessary. Whereas in Windows you can develop registry issues if you don't remove things properly.
Just moving a Windows program to the Recycle Bin without uninstalling would leave detritus in the Registry. Fine. But doing this enough times will slow down a Windows system to a crawl, among other things.
No version of the Mac OS has ever used a Registry, so it is really not a hugely critical issue to have an Uninstall function.
In reality, it is that easy for 98% or more of the programs you might use, although it is true that a few small minor files may be left behind if you do this. Those files might take up a trivial amount of hard drive space, but don't do any damage or slow anything down, or really cause any kind of negative impact at all. Neatniks will want to remove these other things (like preferences files, for example), but for most of us, they don't particularly matter.
The 2% of programs where it is important to completely remove everything are those programs that install StartupItems, daemons, or kexts. Things like APE - Application Enhancer (try to avoid), or HP's all-in-one printer drivers, need to be completely eradicated down to the smallest little piece in order to remove them from your system. In theory, this 2% should always include Uninstallers.
And as for general "cleaning", OS X cleans itself. It's a Unix feaure, using cron maintenance scripts that run automatically at certain (usually set) times per day. OS X requires no maintenance of any kind.
