Can't uninstall any programs - Not enough space on hard drive

[Brotuulaan]

I'm trying to uninstall my current antivirus, but it won't uninstall because "there's not enough space" on my hard drive.

Seems dumb, but computers are strange sometimes.

I wondered whether it was unique to that application, so I went to another that I don't use anymore and tried to uninstall it: same thing happened.

So how do I uninstall programs and free up space if I don't have enough space to uninstall programs?! This is friggin' retarded!

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

First use CCleaner to remove all the accumulated junk files if you haven't used it recently.

If still not enough space freed up, see if there's anything that can be manually transferred to another drive (eg videos, pictures etc).

 

[Brotuulaan]

First use CCleaner to remove all the accumulated junk files if you haven't used it recently.

If still not enough space freed up, see if there's anything that can be manually transferred to another drive (eg videos, pictures etc).

Will do.

What if I don't find anything easily movable/deletable? It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure I moved all my pictures and such when I added my terabyte HDD.

 

[faalin]

Download Windirstat https://windirstat.net/download.html it will tell you where everything is at, one normal place that eats a lot of space is the temp folder.

 

[boju]

What would be taking up so much space if its not pictures and such? What do you use your computer for? Games? Surely you'd know where the space is going.

 

[Unolocogringo]

Most people can clear a few gigs by doing a Windows disk clean up.
I've seen computers with 40gig of System restore files.

 

[The Paladin]

I would remove any program you dont use...
Center in windows search "Programs and applications" and uninstall older games or what not your not using anymore.

 

[Brotuulaan]

Yes, games take up a large portion of my hard drive.

The Paladin, I couldn't do that because uninstalling anything from there kept giving me the error that I didn't have enough space on my hard drive. But now I've got enough space cleared to uninstall stuff!

I looked around in my directory for items that didn't require uninstalling and I didn't need anymore, and I found that I still had a folder for Dropbox that had a decent amount of space used (something like 2GB). I deleted that whole folder, and now I can uninstall all the things!

 

[Brotuulaan]

Perhaps it would be a good thing to keep a movable file on every hard drive in order to guarantee free space later? Have you ever heard of anyone doing such a thing? I could see that being good practice, given this experience.

 

[boju]

Usual practice is buy more hdds, they're so cheap

 

[faalin]

If its a SSD you should keep 15-20% of the drive free for optimal performance.