Only few programs can work right after you copy them onto your hard drive. The majority require you to create an installation by means of a software installer.

The majority of programs you see these days are released as a distributive.

For programmers there are ample possibilities to make their releases more successful using commercial or freely distributed install maker.

Should you work with Windows platform, there is a popular program called Microsoft Windows Installer that lets developers making install with ease.

IntstallShield and SetupBuilder are two more installation software applications for Microsoft Windows system.

All of them might create the so-called packages that can help you install software on any Windows system.

Not happy with commercial installation creator programs? There are also a couple of nice open source programs available. Check out Clickteam Install Creater and Innosetup, to name a couple.

A number of developers try to make their products work on different systems.

Making installation packages for various systems often requires quite a bit of effort on the part of developers.

If each install creator for each platform be it Linux, Windows XP, Mac OS or a different platform was developed individually, it would require quality assurance,that is extra time in development and testing to guarantee a satisfactory experience to users.

Fortunately, there are also cross-system installation software applications.

You can also find an outstanding commercial product called IntallAnywhere.

If something has been installed once, may have to be removed later.

In the past some solutions contained no uninstallers, so some third-party uninstallers had to be used.

3rd-party uninstallers are rarely used this way these days, as they are sometimes less efficient than built-in uninstall procedures.

Nevertheless, even now there could be help from third party uninstallers.

Another reason is that some solutions choose not to erase themselves completely leaving some files behind.

Trojan and spyware solutions pose one more challenge to your computer.

Such a soultion will not delete itself voluntarily, so some assistance from a dedicated uninstaller could be needed.

Uninstallers often have some extra functionality such as a cache and temporary files manager, etc.