PUI

Designed for PC power users, PUI (Program Uninstallation Information) is a tool that allows you to view and edit the uninstall string of your installed applications without accessing the registry. It comes packed with other useful options as well, such as app uninstallation, registry backup, and file listing.

After a brief and uneventful setup operation, make sure to run PUI with administrative rights.

It populates its primary window with a lot of information about installed software, including their registry entry, publisher, name, version, installed date, whether it can be uninstalled or not, normal and quiet uninstall string, registry path, full path in Explorer, installation source and file, contact, homepage, link for updated, support link, and ReadMe file path.

The status bar reveals total items which cannot be removed, items which require manual removal, and total items. There's also a legend available that explains the color codes for highlighted entries: dark gray for items which cannot be removed, blue for manual uninstall, and green for Microsoft entries.

It's possible to edit any of the aforementioned properties for any entry in the list. Plus, you can copy the information of one or more selected entries to the Clipboard, uninstall programs normally or quietly (wherever this is applicable), as well as create registry backups for specific keys, or remove the keys from the computer.

Moreover, PUI gives you the possibility to look up online additional details on product names or developers, registry names, or uninstall strings. Otherwise, you can customize the lookup pattern.

The entire list can be saved to plain text documents, with or without the summary. It's also possible to import registry keys, view and manage backups, and check out currently running processes (file names, process and parent IDs, number of threads).

No error dialogs popped up in our tests and the utility didn't hang or crash. It had minimal impact on computer performance, running on low CPU and RAM. Too bad that PUI hasn't been updated for a pretty long time.

Although it has a rudimentary look and seems unreliable, PUI is quite versatile when it comes to thoroughly analyzing app uninstall entries and making modifications, so make sure to give it a shot if you're an advanced user who knows what he's doing. Plus, it's free.