Hi everyone,
I installed the large 124 MB portable apps suite on my hard drive because I just wanted to check it out. I meant to install it to a folder on my desktop but I installed it directly to my desktop by mistake. It seems to have installed an icon in my lower task-bar.
What shocked me is that the installation seems to have taken up a huge amount of hard drive space, like perhaps 80 GB or so. I have a 289 GB hard drive and now I have about 183 GB of free space. Before the installation, I think I had much more free space. I am using Windows XP media Center SP2.
My questions are, how much hard drive space is the installation supposed to take up ?
How do I fully un-install the portable apps suite from my computer ?
I would appreciate any help anyone can provide.
Thanks
John
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Hi john2010 and welcome to PortableApps.com. Sorry to hear of your difficulties. By installing to the desktop, do you mean you installed it to your C:\ drive? The full Suite takes up about 400mb when installed after you run a couple apps. If it is taking up more than that, you probably have errors on your hard drive and should fix those before doing anything else.
To check your HD for errors and fix them, open up My Computer, right-click on your C: drive and click Properties. Click the Tools tab. Then under Error Checking, click Check Now. In the window that comes up, be sure Automatically fix file system errors is checked off and then click Start. You will probably have to reboot your machine.
Hopefully that will fix your errors.
As far as the icon in your taskbar, that's just while the PortableApps.com Platform is running. If you click it, the Menu will show up. Then in the menu, just click the X button in the lower right to close it. It runs when you finish installing the Suite.
If you'd like to uninstall, just open My Computer and browse to your C:\ drive. Delete the directories PortableApps and Documents (making sure you didn't put any of your own stuff in there, first). Then delete the files StartPortableApps.exe and autorun.inf. When you reboot or log out and back in, the icon for your C:\ drive will go back to normal.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Hi John T. Haller,
Thanks for your feedback.
Yes, I installed portable-apps to :\Documents and Settings\HP_Administrator\Desktop
What I have on my desktop is an icon named Portableapps that is 351 MB in size and another icon named documents that is 622 bytes. Is this the entire installation ?
The installation will not change the registry or system files in any way will it ? If I delete the two files on my desktop, will this completely remove everything ? If it only takes up 400 MB or so, then I would probably just leave it on.
Perhaps it was not portableapps that filled the hard drive, and I just happened to notice when I put the mouse pointer over the portable apps icon, and it showed the used and free space of the hard drive. I then right clicked on the C drive and the properties showed that a huge amount of hard drive space had been taken up.
I need to find out why so much space is being used. I'm on dial up internet and there is no way this much data was downloaded to the computer.
I hope I don't have some type of malware that is filling up my hard-drive by copying files or something.
I will run the disk error checker as you recommended. Any further feedback in the meantime would be appreciated.
Thanks again,
John
Ok, John. If you installed it to your desktop, then yes, the entire thing is contained in the following directories:
C:\Documents and Settings\HP_Administrator\Desktop\PortableApps.com (your apps)
C:\Documents and Settings\HP_Administrator\Desktop\Documents (your docs)
And then there were two files: autorun.inf and StartPortableApps.exe. Those four things are the entire installation. Installing to your desktop is fine for trying it out, but some apps like OpenOffice.org may have an issue running from there. It's more designed to be installed to your flash drive's root directory.
As for the other stuff on your PC, I'd suggest scanning for bad stuff using a good antivirus program and then an antispyware program like Spybot or Ad-Aware. You can also use CCleaner to remove temp files and other stuff left behind, but be sure and look through your selected options to ensure you don't accidentally delete your browser's cookies or history if you don't want to.
If you're still unsure what is taking up all that space, try something like WinDirStat that will map your drive for you. We even have it portable:
https://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/windirstat_portable
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!