What is the main diff between uninstalling and deleting?

[Sebouh]

hey guys i was just wondering about this since i uninstalled a game and it's name got removed from the addd and remove section but the file with its original size was still in my drive.
thanks.

 

[SFR]

hey guys i was just wondering about this since i uninstalled a game and it's name got removed from the addd and remove section but the file with its original size was still in my drive.
thanks.

did you use the games uninstaller or add/remove?


There are a ton of registry files and .dll's all over the place that wont be deleted when you just delete the .exe or the folder with the .exe in it...

Using a provided uninstaller or Windows add/remove might not catch everything.. but it should at least get rid of the .exe and everything in that folder... (I've used Norton's uninstaller before... works pretty well..)

 

[Cromewell]

that's just a shoddy uninstaller, they must have been lazy when they made it. Generally an uninstaller is supposed to remove all components that it installed (as SFR said theres registry entries and often files are dumped into %windir%\system32).

 

[Sebouh]

But if i delete instead of uninstalling it wont give me big troubles for my hard disk right...cause i remember when i was a kid and we had bought a new pc ( pentium 133mhz..those days) and once the man who fixed our pc said that we had removed many progs by deleting which had caused errors and stuff...he even said once that i had installed alot of stuff and that caused my printer not to work, i wonder if that's true too, hehe.

 

[Klyla]

When you "delete" a program it doesn't remove the changes that installing made to your registry and other places in Windows. I usually "uninstall" and only then if the program files/ location is still there, I delete it and delete the desktop icon by hand. That way I am more confident that changes were made to the registry first.

Just my 2 cents.