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Vance Hunt
has provided home-user help desk style support for his consulting company for over 6 years. Making his home in beautiful Southern California, Vance provides general computer Q&A for users via his weekly column.
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 | Friday, October 27, 2006 |
| Never reinvent the wheel unless you have a better design for it. |
| By Vance Hunt |
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I wish to uninstall an application with the following uninstall string:
RunDll32 C:\[...]\Ctor.dll,LaunchSetup "C:\[...]\Setup.exe"
-l0x9 mmUninstall - Can I run this uninstall silently?
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Based on the look of the uninstall string you sent, my guess would be that
you opened the registry up, navigated to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows \CurrentVersion\Uninstall\[Application]
and copied the contents of the value/data pair
UninstallString. Although this is a good place to start, it will
take work to see if you can make the uninstall go silently.
First thing to keep in mind is that the uninstall is controlled by the setup
program, in this case SETUP.EXE, and not the RunDLL32
executable. There are no generic command line additions you can make to
change how RunDLL32 is handling the execution, as it really is doing nothing
more launching the
CTOR.DLL and passing it command line parameters, which in this case are
both the name of the actual uninstall program (SETUP.EXE)
and additional parameters for the uninstall program to use.
My second guess would be that you want to uninstall this from more than one
workstation in an automated fashion. That's good as might take a bit of
work to change the command line you have into one that can be called silently.
The first place I would start is with the vendor's web support area to see if
they provide uninstall instructions beyond what you already have. Very
often the uninstall command line placed in the registry works well for a manual
removal, but is not meant for an automated removal, which is often done by
administrators when they need to clean software off of workstations, or by a
higher version of the same software that needs to first uninstall the old
program then install the new. If the vendor has no additional information,
I would next look at the documentation for the uninstaller itself. Based
on information contained in your command line (which we snipped for
readability), InstallSheild provided the installer used. Look for
information on
setup command line parameters and options to see if adding a generic switch
to the
uninstall command line is all that is required to remove it quietly, or if
you have to take further steps of recording answer files. The latter can
be as easy as adding a
-r to the end of your uninstall command line, performing the uninstall
manually, then taking the recorded
setup.iss file, renaming it to
uninstall.iss, and then using the
-f1 switch to specify the uninstall script of subsequent uninstalls.
You might also try resources such as
www.AppDeploy.com to see
if anyone else has already completed a silent uninstall for your product and has
posted the answer.
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My laptop has very few USB ports. I want to get an external DVD burner. Do they make any that connect to the serial or parallel ports?
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The short answer is yes, you can get external DVD burners that connect in
some other way than USB, like IEEE 1394 FireWire, Serial and Parallel. An example of
such a unit is the
Teac Roboflex Plus 4 DVD±RW Burner
(I've never personally used this unit, I've used the now defunct
MicroSolutions BackPack drives).
The word of caution I have for this style of external device is that Serial
and Parallel ports are going the way of floppy disk drives and PS/2 mouse and
keyboard ports (extinct). Most external devices can be used long after the
primary unit you bought it for has been replaced, so if you purchase a device
that is not the most compatible device available, it will cost you more down the
line if you need to replace it. My advice then is that if your laptop does
not have the FireWire port already, invest in a PCMCIA FireWire card purchase an
external DVD burner that can use FireWire.
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