Is there a way to uninstall programs and drivers of a windows installation in an external drive?

[LMF5000]

I'm the go-to IT guy for many of my friends and family (as I'm sure most of you who read these forums probably are ) and I've seen my fair share of interesting things people do with their computers.

Recently a colleague gave me a laptop to clean up where his kids and wife managed to install 3 virus scanners, six toolbars, and every version of office since 2003. Naturally uninstalling that took hours. Not only was every move being scanned by Norton, McAfee and AVG, but windows 10 was helpfully thrashing the mechanical hard disk doing updates in the background as well.

So it got me thinking. Is there a way to bypass the OS and uninstall software, access the device manager, etc., if this computer's hard drive was placed in a USB enclosure and mounted on my own PC? That would save me hours of waiting for things to load because the PC wouldn't be bogged down by running the garbage programs I would be trying to get rid of.

I know that conceptually it can be done, because I can delete the program files manually with a file explorer, and clean up the registry later, but what I'm looking for is a way to get the add/remove programs list of the OS I'm fixing and run the uninstallers properly without actually having to boot into said OS.

Ditto for device manager - I'd like to be able to uninstall or update device drivers if they're causing issues, without being slowed down by said issues.

Any ideas or software that can do this?

 

[Insert_Nickname]

While not exactly what you're looking for, have you tried safe mode?

That should at least help with background processes.

Another useful addition for the F&F segment are SSDs, especially if the PC has an el cheapo 5400RPM HDD. It helps both in daily usage, and saves a lot of time when troubleshooting. Since you don't have to wait for a slow HDD.

 

[corkyg]

I would give Revo Uninstaller a shot.

 

[LMF5000]

Safe Mode is a good suggestion, thanks. Windows 10 makes the process a little convoluted if you want to enter it without booting up in normal mode first. Does tapping F8 still work on the most recent builds?

As for SSDs, all my PC's use them (in fact my main one has a pair of SSDs in RAID 0) but the family members who need my help typically have 5+ year-old laptops with only one HDD slot and they hesitate to invest €100 or more to replace the HDD with a decent size SSD for such an old machine.

Revo Uninstaller looks interesting, but would it work on a hard drive/installation that's in an external hard drive (say, F: ) rather than the boot drive (C: )?

Also, is there a way to access device manager externally? I ask because a few days ago I updated a hard disk controller driver and it stopped windows from booting. As a quick and dirty workaround, I plugged the drive into another slot using a different controller, and was able to boot normally and roll back the change. Could I have done that somehow with the HDD in an enclosure connected to my main PC, rather than having to boot into the system I'm trying to fix?

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Safe Mode is a good suggestion, thanks. Windows 10 makes the process a little convoluted if you want to enter it without booting up in normal mode first. Does tapping F8 still work on the most recent builds?

Depends on whether the system in question has a UEFI with fast boot enabled. If it has, you'll need to go through Windows.

Or be pretty fast with the F8 key...

As for SSDs, all my PC's use them (in fact my main one has a pair of SSDs in RAID 0) but the family members who need my help typically have 5+ year-old laptops with only one HDD slot and they hesitate to invest €100 or more to replace the HDD with a decent size SSD for such an old machine.

SSDs are thankfully getting to the point were hand-me-down is feasible if they don't have too many writes on them. It makes for a good second life for the ones left over from various upgrades. In my case that is. YMMV.

 

[PastTense]

With respect to your original laptop situation an alternative would be a fresh install.

It also sounds like you could have disconnected from the internet (and shut off the virus scanners and no Windows updates happening) while you were doing part of this.