Why does installing a game/program sometimes take several hours, but uninstalling usually take no more than a few minutes?
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Installing it involves reading it in and decompressing it, sometimes across the Internet.
Uninstalling it just involves marking the sectors it occupies as free.
Because the game is not actually scrubbed off the hard drive when you uninstall, the only thing that actually gets deleted is the pointer to where the game is saved.
Usually, when you uninstall something, nothing actually happens to the data. Most of the 0’s and 1’s are still there, your computer just gets rid of the tag on that data that says “Hey, this is Program X, don’t write over this!” The analogy a lot of people use is this: a computer is a library, and each file is a book. When you delete a file, nobody throws out the book. They just throw out the card catalog entry that leads to the book.
Later on when you install a new program, it’ll look for some free space, see that there’s no tag on that area, and overwrite it with its own 0’s and 1’s.
Allocating space is buying a plot of land.
Installing a game is building a house on the plot. This takes some time to unpack and use materials (data).
Uninstalling a game is putting up a “For Sale” sign on the property. Everything on the property still exists until it’s rebuilt (rewritten).
Most installations these days have several tasks to complete in series: Unpack and install all the program files at the desired location (decompression requires both high disk activity and high processing activity). Then, often, download and update the latest fixes for the game, requiring a second round of installations. Also, some games require additional installations of frameworks like DirectX or utilities like a launcher.
Deinstallations on the other hand, usually consist of deleting the files and settings. Deleting a file is a fast operation on a drive – you’re not actually erasing the data, you’re just marking the space on the disk as “available” so that new data can be written over the old files.
Think of your hard drive like a building, you want to install something, like a new library, you put up some walls, paint them, build some book cases, unpack all your books, organize them all onto the shelves, and setup some chairs and lighting. that all takes a fair bit of time.
Now when you want to unistall something, you take all the books off the shelves and move the furniture out and then just stop going into the room room for now. You don’t bother dismantling the shelves, removing the paint or taking down the walls, if you want to re-use that space later you will just do it then when you are setting up the new room
Deleting is just removing pointers and references to the data. Think of erasing a line from a table of contents in a book. The chapters (data) is still there but all pointers to it are gone.
Installing is unpacking, determining what options are necessary and updating or overwriting hundreds/ thousands of files.
This unpacking (temp files) also needs space to work, not enough and the system is constantly moving things around. Think of inserting a new chapter in middle of book that is bigger than the space you have.
When you install something, all the program files needs to be decompressed and deployed by the installer which also makes the necessary registry entries, too ‒ every computer is at least a bit different. But when you uninstall something, the uninstaller only needs to delete things and it knows all locations perfectly, so, it can be done quickly.
Writing data is like painting a mural. It takes effort, time and energy to make the information perfect.
Deleting something is equivalent to saying “ignore the mural, paint whatever you want over top of it”
Copying a file to a computer means having to write a bunch of data to a disk — many, perhaps billions, of bytes are read then written back out again. Deleting data involves, effectively, just deleting the file’s name, something that requires writing just a trivial amount of data (a few dozen bytes).
Most people don’t realize that “deleting a file” typically leaves the data there without actually deleting it. The disk has a thing called a directory, which is just a list of files, their names, and where on the disk the file’s data is stored. When you delete a file, it simply removes the name from the list so the file is not found and its space isn’t considered in use any more. In older Microsoft disk formats, it actually just changed the first letter of the filename to mark it as deleted. You can find software that will find those “deleted” files if they haven’t been written over by something else, and “recover” them by finding the chunk of data and giving it a name.
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