Regaining Disk Space is something anyone would love, because who would like to see a ‘Low Disk Space‘ error regularly on their PC, when there are ways to remove useless stuff and use the same space to store some useful files. We have previously covered several articles which can help you in allotting space in your hard drive to better stuff and save yourself from buying new Hard Drives or upgrading the current ones.
By just checking to view Hidden Files and visiting your Windows Folder, you will find tens if not hundreds of some folders which can really confuse you and make you feel that your PC has got corrupted or has been attacked with a virus, but you need not worry because all the $NTUninstall Folders you see are created after approval from you itself and there is no real need to panic regarding this. Now lets see how were these created and can we get rid of these numerous folders.
Whenever you Activate the Windows Update feature in your Computer, the Operating System will connect your PC to the Internet and install Service Package along with lot of updates which are installed freshly or else by replacing older files with newer versions. If you carefully see how the Windows Update is performed you will find that generally a backup is taken after which the Update process is completed and this is the reason these folders are created. These are created with a Prefix of $NTUnistall followed by the Update version or code name. You can directly delete these folders but before you this you need to know that some of these can be important folders too because they could have been recently installed and because of this the deletion of important backuped files can lead to PC issues and if you plan for a uninstallation of any Hot Fixes you will find that the PC wont even restart and give you a error with no solution for the same.
Hence in order to make sure you are going for a complete uninstall, its recommended to use different utilities which can remove the corresponding Registry Entries for these folders and also if you delete these folders, by any means you wont be able to Uninstall the Windows Update which is why i would not always recommend you to delete the $NTUninstall folders. Still if you are keen to do this job here is the procedure.
You can directly visit the Windows Folder, then click on the Tools> Folder Options > View > Check on Show Hidden Files & Folders and then list folders by type. Note the Suffix of each NTUninstall folder which has a small KB Number, make a note of this and delete the folder. Next open Regedit via Start > Run > regedit , and in the Registry Editor, you need to expand SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall following which you need to delete the subkey [name/KB number , then Expand SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Management\ARPCache & Delete the subkey [name/KB number].
The above option is going to perfectly delete the folder and its associated Registry File, but because of this you wont be able to roll back or uninstall the never update and if you want to fix this you need to visit the Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs and under this you will find a list of all the updates installed on your computer. These are generally shown after you select a option on the Top Right ‘Show updates’ after which a list of all the updates are shown along with the installation date, Click on Remove to uninstall the complete update and fix everything.
Web Host says
I could find lot of files on my PC with that ntuninstall name and I was previously confused whether to delete those files or not.