IObit Uninstaller 3 review: Free utility competes with a built-in Windows feature, almost wins

There’s something ironic about third-party uninstallers: They make you add another tool  to get rid of the crud that’s already installed on your computer. Windows’ own Programs and Features tool does a good job of letting you browse through installed applications and remove what you don’t need—so IObit Uninstaller 3 needs to work hard to convince users it really is needed.

IObit Uninstaller 3 tries to woo you with pretty looks.

The first piece of good news is that IObit Uninstaller 3 doesn’t need to be installed in the traditional sense of the word—it won’t make you Next-Next-Next through a setup wizard before you can use it. You just need to run it, click through a single UAC prompt, and start removing software you don’t want.

It may feel like you’re running a portable app, but IObit Uninstaller 3 does install itself, in a sense: It adds a button to the Programs and Features tool, which serves as a handy reminder that you have the app installed (seeing as how most people don’t uninstall software on a daily basis).

Inside IObit Uninstaller 3, you’ll find two tabs: Programs, and Browser plug-ins. The former isn’t much different than what’s built into Windows, save for one key point: You can select multiple applications for batch removal. IObit Uninstaller 3 would then sequentially launch the uninstallers for those applications, which means you’ll still have to sit there and click through every uninstaller.

Being able to select multiple applications for removal is a nice bonus.

Once an application is uninstalled, IObit Uninstaller 3 can scan your system for remnants, hunting for both leftover files and registry keys. You can then review and remove them.

The post-removal scan sometimes reveals leftover files and registry keys.

The second tab, Browser plug-ins, is more of a gimmick. You do get a list of plugins, but it doesn’t say which plugin is installed on which browser—not much use in these days of multiple browsers. When you click on a plugin to remove it, you get an alert asking you to “please make sure each plug-in selected is malicious.” That’s a tall order: IU3 does show ratings for every browser plugin, but they’re all empty at the time of this writing. Determining malice is up to you.

You may have lots of browser plugins installed... but for which browser?

The main reasons to try out IObit Uninstaller 3 are its fetching interface and the batch uninstall feature. The price tag (free) doesn’t hurt either. That said, if you’re getting along fine with the uninstaller built into Windows, you’re not missing out on anything important.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Buffalo WZR-1750DHP 802.11ac Wi-Fi router review: Respectable feature set, mediocre performance

Buffalo Technology WZR-1750DHP AC1750 Router Buffalo’s WZR-1750DHP has a pretty good feature set, but it’s an also-ran in terms of range and throughput. On the flipside, it was the least expensive of the six routers we tested.

Buffalo was first to market with an 802.11ac router, and for a time it was the only manufacturer shipping an 802.11ac client bridge. The WZR-1750DHP is the company's second effort, but it’s not very exciting. Its performance and feature set left it in fifth place in this six-router roundup.

As its name indicates, this is a dual-band router delivering throughput up to 450 mbps on its 2.4- and 5GHz 802.11n networks, and up to 1300 mbps on its 5GHz 802.11ac network. As it did with its first effort, Buffalo trapped the three antennas inside the router's enclosure. As you’ll see in the performance benchmarks, its range suffered accordingly.

ROBERT CARDIN

Buffalo's WZR-1750DHP is the least-expensive 802.11ac router I've tested.

The WZR-1750DHP has one USB 3.0 port and one USB 2.0 port and can support both shared USB storage and a shared USB printer. But since it doesn’t support drives formatted NTFS, I didn’t measure its NAS performance. This router has most of the same business-oriented features as the Asus RT-AC68U, including VPN, FTP, and SAMBA servers, but it doesn’t support WAN bridging or the ability to connect a 3G/4G mobile broadband dongle to its USB port as the Asus RT-AC68U does.

On the consumer side, Buffalo included UPnP and DLNA media servers, but not an iTunes server. An integrated BitTorrent client means you can download torrents to an attached hard drive without tying up a PC on your network. The WZR-1750DHP’s Quality of Service (QoS) feature allows you to assign priority to video streaming, VoIP, gaming, audio streaming, web-browsing, or file downloads. You can tweak the values for each of these settings or create your own custom rules.

The WZR-1750DHP’s parental controls, via Symantec’s Norton ConnectSafe web-filtering service, are better than average. But nothing I’ve seen compares to PowerCloud’s Skydog (unfortunately, that router is limited to the 802.11n standard).

ROBERT CARDIN

The Buffalo WZR-1750DHP has one USB 3.0 port and one USB 2.0 port, so you can share both storage and a printer on your network. 

You can configure the WZR-1750DHP to operate as a router, a wireless access point, or a wireless client bridge. It doesn’t offer TurboQAM on its 802.11n network, but I don’t see that as a major shortcoming since the client also must support that technology, and relatively few devices do.

Each of the routers delivered high TCP throughput when paired with an identical router configured as an 802.11ac wireless bridge, but the WZR-1750DHP finished next to last at most locations in this scenario.

The WZR-1750DHP’s performance flipped when I paired it with a Linksys WUMC710 802.11ac wireless bridge. It finished dead last in the two closer-range tests, but it performed very well when the client was in my home theater and in my home office.

When paired with a Linksys WUSB6300 802.11ac client adapter, Buffalo’s router finished in third place at close range, but it surprised me with a last-place finish when the client was in the kitchen, just 20 feet from the router. Its long-range performance—with the client in my home office—was equally poor. 

Buffalo’s router turned in a good performance as a 5GHz 802.11n router, at least at close range. It took a strong first-place finish when the client was 9 feet from the router with no walls separating the two. Here again, however, its performance dropped off rapidly with distance.

The WZR-1750DHP turned in fairly good performances running a 2.4 802.11n network, but it had a difficult time reaching the client when the client was in my home theater.

The WZR-1750DHP doesn't support hard drives formatted NTFS, so I didn't measure its performance reading and writing files from and to an attached hard drive, because the drive I use for this test is formatted NTFS. Buffalo's was the only router with this limitation.  (Trendnet's TEW-812DRU V2 supports NTFS drives, but it wouldn't recognize the drive I used for testing, so I didn't evaluate its performance on this metric either.)

As an 802.11ac router, Buffalo’s WZR-1750DHP is plenty fast enough to stream HD video to just about any room in your home. Its feature set is strong, and its parental controls are much better than average. But if you’re looking for the fastest 802.11ac router, this one clearly isn’t in the running. The absence of support for USB hard drives formatted NTFS renders it a weak NAS solution.

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Video: Adobe Demos Content-Aware Move Feature in Photoshop CS6

Adobe’s has introduced some amazing new functionality in CS6, its newest version of Photoshop. On Monday, Adobe released a video on YouTube demonstrating one of the slickest features of CS6: Content-aware move, a tool that lets you seamlessly move or remove an object in an image and then automatically fills in the background. No more using clone brush or other advanced feature to cover up that random guy in the background of your group photo — CS6 will handle it on the fly. CS6 also adds functionality to the content-aware move tool that allows you to extend an object in the image — say, the edge of a roof — without using any complicated tools. Adobe’s video demonstrating the power of these features speaks for itself:

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