How To Find And Uninstall Programs You Don’t Use
How many of the programs on your computer do you truly use on a regular basis? Some programs might be just out-of-date, and others may be bloatware, harmful malware, or unnecessary clutter that you should delete from your computer.
Such programs take up extra hard drive space, and can also have an impact on your system’s performance. Additionally, some programs may be set up to launch instantly upon computer startup or to run continually in the background. This may create a disturbance in your system’s working.
You should find and uninstall such applications you never use or don’t need anymore to make more room on your hard drive. For this procedure, you can utilize any third-party best uninstaller software for Windows or the manual methods we are going to discuss further.
Let us begin with the manual techniques to do so!
Quick Methods to Remove Unnecessary Programs
Go through the below-explained methods and clear up your storage space right away!
Uninstall the unused applications
It is advisable to delete all the applications you do not really use and are just occupying unnecessary space on your computer. To do so, follow the below instructions.
- Hit the Search button on your Windows taskbar and type Control Panel in it.
- Go to the Programs section and then select the Program and Features option.
- Scroll through the list of applications on your system and choose the unwanted and unused ones. Press the Uninstall button to remove them.
Remove the pre-installed programs
Windows OS comes with plenty of pre-installed unwanted programs that do nothing but takes up valuable storage space on your hard drive. Find such programs and remove them to clear up some room for other necessary and important programs.
Follow the below steps to perform this.
- Click on the Start button. Then, tap on the Settings icon.
- Choose the Apps option from the window opened.
- Now, go through the list of applications that appear and remove the ones you feel are unwanted and taking up huge space.
Remove applications from the Root folders
Some of your applications might be stored in their root directories and folders. Check for such unwanted and resource-eating programs in your system’s root directory and remove them.
These directories also include certain essential Windows programs. Though Windows will forbid you from deleting items necessary to its operation, you could still remove some of them.
Remove Add-ons and Toolbars
It’s possible that toolbars won’t always appear in the list of programs. Do the following steps to get rid of them:
For Google Chrome.
Open the browser and enter chrome:/extensions in the browser’s URL bar. Once you press Enter, a list of all installed plugins, including toolbars, will appear. Remove the ones you don’t require.
For Windows Edge.
This process is a little complicated. Launch Edge and enter about:flags in the URL bar. Tick the checkbox near the “Enable extension developer features entry option.”
Restart your Edge browser and click the three small dots in the upper right corner of Edge. Now, select Extensions. You will find here a collection of add-ons and plugins that are simple to remove.
For Internet Explorer.
It is a little bit simpler with Internet Explorer. To manage add-ons, select the Manage Add-ons option by clicking the tiny cog button located at the top right corner. All toolbars, search engines, and extensions that you don’t require can be disabled from here.
Remove the program data
Program Data is a “hidden” folder in Windows that is mostly used to hold information or configuration files for your applications, as well as sometimes complete programs.
Here, you will discover directories for programs that you have stopped using for a long time or already removed from the system. So, it is advisable to remove such space-hogging data.
To do so, follow these quick steps.
- Hit the Windows key + R simultaneously on your keyboard.
- Enter %programdata% in the Run dialog box.
- A list of program folders will appear. Delete the data and folders of the program you no longer need.
Conclusion
So, this was all about how to find and uninstall not required programs from your computer system quickly. We hope you find the aforementioned steps easy to follow and helpful in creating good storage space on your system.