Friday, April 8, 2011

Old JRE's on my dev computer

I mentioned in an earlier post that I installed JDK 1.6.0_24.  I noticed that Sun (or should I now say Oracle) recommends uninstalling older version of Java from your system.  They say the older versions present a "serious security risk".  I didn't feel too worried but I figured I'd go ahead an uninstall the JRE's and JDK that I'll never likely use again anyway.  After all, I can use all the disk space I can get on this old resource starved dev machine.

Sun conveniently provides instructions for uninstalling Java on Windows.  It's the usual Control Panel > Add / Remove Programs (at least that's how XP still does it).  I ran the uninstaller for the half dozen of so previous Java versions without incident.

After all was said and done I opened Windows Explorer and looked for the old Java install folders.  I was a little disappointed to still find each of the old Java install root folders on my system with a handful of .dlls and .jars in each folder.  Of course I've seen many uninstallers leave artifacts on my system but it's always a little annoying.  I Googled a few the .dll names and found some posts of others asking what to do about these remnants.  Sorry I didn't take a note of any examples before I deleted the folders from my system.  They're gone now and I haven't experienced any side effects. I wish the Java uninstallers did a complete job.

Note: It's a good idea to check your %Java_Home% and %Path% Windows Environment Variables to confirm they are set to your current JDK.  I had to update mine.

Maybe there's a good reason for leaving these old .jars and .dlls?  Please post comments if you have anything to add.

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