1.1 About NSIS
The installer is your application's first impression. Slow or unsuccessful software installations is one of the most irritating computer problems. A quick and user friendly installer is therefore an essential part of your software product. NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a tool that allows programmers to create such installers for Windows. It is released under an open source license and is completely free for any use.
NSIS creates installers that are capable of installing, uninstalling, setting system settings, extracting files, etc. Because it's based on script files you can fully control every part of your installer. The scripting language supports variables, functions and string manipulation, just like a normal programming language - but designed for the creation of installers. Even with all these features, NSIS is still the smallest installer system available. With the default options, it has an overhead of only 34 KB.
With NSIS 3 you can also create Unicode installers, targeting all the languages supported by the OS without display issues.