when uninstalling an app on Windows, why do some files get left over?

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I’ve mainly used OSX/MacOS tho right out my life, but have used Windows for work. From my understanding, installing an app on Windows scatters files throughout the OS and makes it sometimes difficult to fully uninstall an app. Often times there are files that are leftover.

In macOS it’s super easy because with a lot of apps, the files are bundled within the app itself making it easier to remove.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s generally 2 categories of files left over.

Configuration files, these are tiny, and are left behind so that when you re-install, all your settings are as you left them.

The second is dependencies. Say your program needs “CoolGraphics.DLL”, a popular graphics framework. So you install, check if its there, if not you install it in the central framework location

But when you uninstall, you have to be careful, you can’t just mindlessly remove it. That could break other programs that also use CoolGraphics So you can check if any other program uses it, and only delete it if there’s none or… you just ignore it and don’t take the risk. You don’t wanna make the news that uninstalling your program breaks people’s computers

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