Manual deselection sucks (I do NOT want to purge ALL lists!)

The author of MRUblaster has taken the super paranoid approach that all its users want all MRU lists wiped out. Wrong! In fact, I like the MRU lists for their ease-of-use provision. However, some lists end up with old, outdated, defunct, or invalid entries and I'd like to clear them out to start over. Does MRUblaster let me select the 1 or 10 entries that *I* want to clear? No, instead it defaults to preselecting all 300, or more, lists that it found in my registry. Can I highlight all the entries and then deselect them all (so I can then select just the few that I want to clear)? No, because I cannot select them all at once (nor is there a context menu to then let me toggle their selection). Is there a button to deselect all of the entries so I could then just select the few that I want to clear? No. The user is presented with a long list where all entries are preselected and manually having to deselect hundreds of entries one by one is the only way to clear just a select few that the user really wants to clear. So the primary and intended operation of MRUblaster is to blast away ALL lists despite it showing a super long list where the user could do all the manual deselects. All or nothing (or, All or "take a long time to deselect hundreds") mode is a poor choice for behavior.

Also, no information is provided to relate the entry shown in MRUblaster's list with the registry key to which it belongs. So I really haven't a clue as to what registry key will get modified or cleared by a particular entry shown in MRUblaster's list. I dislike that Ad-Aware and Spybot never elucidate just exactly what change they intend to commit when removing a detected spyware product. I really dislike being treated like a moron user that is deliberately kept blind as to what registry keys will get deleted or cleared by MRUblaster. I want to know what you intend to change with your program - which registry key, what was the old value, and what will be the new value or if the registry key gets deleted. Why should I trust the author of MRUblaster if he/she won't trust us with our own property by letting us know exactly what is being claimed as an MRU list and what changes will be made in one of the most critical files of the operating system?

Why even bother showing the user the list of all the supposed MRU lists found in the registry if you are going to hide which registry keys they belong and also not allow a decent method of selecting exactly which ones to clear? Good idea but incomplete implementation. Guess I'll keep hunting for a more useful, controllable, and informative solution.

I want to brush the snow off my car's windshield and you give me a bulldozer!

 

You are correct regarding the original purpose of MRU-Blaster: to purge all known MRU lists.

And you bring up some very good suggestions for improvements:
-A context menu for the "Show Results" screen that has Select All/Deselect All options (this could perhaps even be enhanced so you could select all entries with "X" in their name)
-Displaying registry location information on the Show Results screen. This could perhaps be implemented as an advanced option (I'm sure some people would rather not see it).

It certainly isn't my intention to treat you or anyone else in such a degrading fashion. The original purpose of MRU-Blaster was to allow the user to quickly and easily clean all MRUs (or all but a few select lists). The program wasn't originally designed to assist in easily deleting just a few select lists (but could certainly be redesigned to aide such use).

The Show Results screen does tell you the program, and the type of list MRU-Blaster has detected (Recent Files List, Recent Playlists, etc.). But I do acknowledge that having the additional ability to show the full registry location would be useful for some users, and I have indeed added it to my to-do list.

Best regards,

-Javacool

 

Thanks for the reply. Nice to know that the author is open to suggestions (even if they do come in the form of complaints). I'll check back periodically to see when such features become available.

 

I have to say yes to some of this too.

If there were a provison, as in Spybot to exclude some of the MRU's it would be helpful.

I generally use MRU Blaster to take everything out. But there are a dozen or so that I want to persist.

I don't know how hard it would be to add to the program the ability to check or uncheck certain MRUs and have the "exclude" from deleting be persistent. Then if I wanted to do all, I could either uncheck the excluded ones or select "all" and it would persist, until I picked others to be excluded from deletion.

It's a great little program. I like it. But I can't put it on a schedule, since I want to keep a dozen or so of the MRUs from being erased and this has to be done manually.

Just a thought.

Bob