Why does installing a game/program sometimes take several hours, but uninstalling usually take no more than a few minutes?
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If installing a program is like building a house, uninstalling a program is like driving over to the house and slapping a sign on it that says “condemned, land for sale.”
Your computer doesn’t waste time actually taking anything apart until it needs to use it. It just marks the house as no longer useful and then overwrites it later when it needs that land (disk space).
EDIT: this is why it’s sometimes possible to recover deleted files with a recovery program: they get marked as deleted, but they’re still there. A program that knows what to look for can find “deleted” data that hasn’t been overwritten by new data yet, and just take the “deleted” sign down.
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