Badly written games causing problems

Craig234

Lifer
May 1, 2006
38,548
350
126
Just a rant.

From time to time space gets low on my little 80gb C:SSD that has Win 7, World of Warcraft (inactive, without the latest expansion), and a few small programs.

That happened again, and it causes a lot of problems - including things like lag in world of tanks, or even taking minutes just switching between tabs in the broswer.

So I went looking again - how can that little take up so much space.

I'd been through 'control panel uninstall' list (annoying you can't tell what's on C: versus a full 1tb E: hard drive) and other things, and just manually looking at directories.

Finally, I got a new utility to show disk use, and this one had 3gb of space used by a file in a hidden directory - for a game, Codemasters' F1 racing.

Over a year ago, I installed that - not sure if it even worked - and unintstalled it, but did not know it left a 3gb file on the OS drive (I put games on E:).

None of the above until the utility found the file.

Now, it's very annoying for a game to put a 3gb file on the OS drive without asking, and more annoying not to get rid of it when uninstalled, and even more to make it hidden.

What terrible coding standards to do something like that.
 

Craig234

Lifer
May 1, 2006
38,548
350
126
Next find just after writing that: 1.5gb taken up from over a year ago by World of tanks' installation file it didn't remove on the OS drive.
 

Markbnj

Elite Member <br>Moderator Emeritus
Moderator
Sep 16, 2005
15,682
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www.markbetz.net
Windows installers are notorious for leaving behind files and registry keys after an uninstall, either because the developer of the install script messed up (install scripts are complicated and the tools suck), or because the file/key was locked/access denied when the uninstall ran.