Why does installing a game/program sometimes take several hours, but uninstalling usually take no more than a few minutes?

Question

Why does installing a game/program sometimes take several hours, but uninstalling usually take no more than a few minutes?

In: 3666

Answer 1

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.