WinDelete proves useful aid

SINCE I have been receiving quite a few questions in recent weeks about uninstal software, I think I shall devote today's column to my experiences last week with my own notebook computer.

Last week my notebook turned incredibly sluggish. I couldn't delete files from AIR Mail, my off-line Internet mail reader, which also, for no apparent reason, started causing general protection faults. I couldn't even save a two-paragraph text file with my word processor.

All classic symptoms of a full hard disk. I fired up File Manager, and sure enough was informed that I had '0 MB free' on my hard disk. Terrible news. Drastic action had to be taken.

First things first. I dived into my mail reader and tried to delete about 200 press releases sent to me by E-mail in the past two weeks. But of course I couldn't do that. AIR mail only lets you delete mail if your disk has free space because it doesn't actually kill the mail right away. It puts it into a waste basket it only empties when you quit the program.

In desperation I went back to File Manager and promptly deleted - after making copies on floppies, of course - a whole directory of stories I had written and that had been published. That gave me enough room to go back to AIR mail and delete some stuff there, but the joy didn't last long. So it was back to File Manager to delete Corel 5.0 in one fell swoop, thus freeing up a whole 14 MB of space.

That left me with the unwelcome prospect of having to go through my AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS and my WIN.INI and SYS.INI files to clear out all the bits and pieces related to Corel 5.0 that simply 'deleting' the program did not get rid of.