Uninstalling Windows Software

There most likely will come a time when you will need to remove some software off of your computer. Maybe it will be a case of you not needing the software anymore or maybe you will need to free up some space on your hard drive. Either way, removing software in Windows is a very easy thing to do.

To remove software from your computer you will need to actually uninstall it. You can’t just delete the software’s installation folder from your computer because that will not properly uninstall it since there will be leftover registry entries and files in other locations. The same thing applies for installing software. You can’t just copy the files from the installation directory over to another computer and expect it to work because it won’t. There are some special circumstances when it will but you don’t see that too often.

The best way to uninstall software is to go your Control Panel and to the Programs and Features utility. The Control Panel can be accessed from the Start menu but if you are running Windows 10 it may be a little hard to find so you can do a search for Control Panel or even Programs and Features. Once you make it there you can find the software you want to remove in the list and then click on the option you want such as Change, Uninstall, Remove or Repair. Just make sure that you don’t have the software running or it might not let you uninstall it.

Programs and Features

Certain programs will only have an uninstall option while others will have a change option that will let you do things like add additional features or run a repair of the software. For example most versions of Microsoft Office will give you several options when you use the change option. Here you can see we have the option to add or remove features, repair the software, remove the software and enter a product key.

Uninstall software

Another way to uninstall software is from the program folder itself. Some software will put an icon in your start menu programs that you can click to uninstall the software. It does the same thing as going to Add/Remove software. This only applies if the software created an uninstall icon when it was installed. Some software has this feature while others don’t.

Uninstall software

There is also the option to uninstall Windows updates if needed for troubleshooting. Sometimes after installing updates you may have issues with your computer not working correctly. If you think it was because of an update you can go into View installed updates and sort by date and uninstall the updates that were applied when you started having the problem.

Uninstall Windows Updates

Clicking on Turn features on and off will show you what additional Windows features you can enable on your computer or even disable if you don’t want that feature to be used. For example you might want to enable the telnet client for remote access to another device or disable SMB file sharing for whatever reason.

Uninstall Windows Updates

As you can see there is a lot you can do from Programs and Features when it comes to the software installed on your computer. Just be careful when using it that you don’t uninstall something you need especially if you don’t have the installation media handy to reinstall it.

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