How to Uninstall a Desktop app in Windows 8

Uninstalling a desktop application in Windows 8 is very similar to uninstalling an application in Windows 7 but there are a few small differences. Here is how you uninstall a desktop application in Windows 8.

Video Transcript:

Hi guys. Mark here from ReviverSoft. Today I’m going to teach you how to uninstall a desktop app in Window 8. I am not going to show you how to uninstall a metro or modern UI application, I’ll show you how to do that in a future video. I’m just going to show you how to uninstall a typical desktop application like you are used to seeing from Windows 7 or Windows XP, or whatever version of Windows you have previously used.

To uninstall an application from Windows 8, what you need to do is open the right hand Charms bar and do that by either going to the top right, or the bottom right hand corner of the screen, or if you want to swipe with your finger from the right hand edge of the screen, if you are using a touch screen, that will also open this Charms bar. Then you click on settings, then control panel. Then this opens up the control panel that you are used to seeing from a previous version of Windows, so maybe Windows 7 or Windows Vista. In this menu, you click on programs and features. This opens up the uninstall or change a program dialogue box.
Now in this box there are a couple of great features here that people are used to overlooking. First of all, applications are sorted by alphabetical order so that makes it very easy to find the application that you know you want to uninstall by just looking for the first letter of the name of the application.

There are two other great views that people don’t use very often, it is the size and installed on columns. If you were to click on the size column, on the top of the size column, it will show you all of the applications you have installed sorted from the largest size, as it is on your hard drive, to the smallest size. Right now I’ve just sorted by largest to smallest and you can see that I have three applications that are over one gigabyte in size, that I could look to uninstall if I were not using them. For instance I have CyberLink Media Suite Essentials here that I do not use and it’s over one gigabyte, so I know that I can free up one gigabyte of space if I was to free up that program.

Now the installed on column show you the date in which the application was installed, so if you would click on it now it will show you the most recently installed applications, but if you would click on it again it shows you the applications that were installed the longest time ago. Now this might help you find application that you’ve installed quite some time ago and had forgotten about or no longer use, but it also helps you find applications that were bundled with your computer when you bought it, for instance, I bought this Dell in January and it came with a bunch of Dell software and you can see that it was all installed on the 29th of January when I first got my computer. I can see that Dell has put a support center on there. It has Dell back-up and recovery, It has some drivers, but it also has this CyberLink Media Suite Essentials program that I looked at before, that takes up over a gigabyte of space.
If I want to uninstall that, which I do because I no longer use that program, all I need to do is select it, then click on uninstall and then that will just open up the typical uninstaller for that program and you can then follow the prompts for that program uninstall it and remove it. Then you go through and do the same thing to any other applications that you no longer use.

Feel free to remove them because typically you can find the download or the setup file for that program on the internet again if you choose to use it again in the future. Go through and uninstall any applications you are not using, it will free up hard drive space and it may also help your computer run faster at startup because there is less programs being loaded at startup.

If you guys have any comments or questions please leave them in this video, otherwise we hope to see you in a future ReviverSoft video.