On every Windows computer, there's plenty of important files and directories where
if you go and delete them, things are not exactly going to work very well anymore.
We already tested things like deleting System32, the entire Windows folder.
But I got a lot of suggestions. What happens if you delete the "Users" folder? This one contains
a lot of important folders, including the AppData folder, you might know about
this. Including all the other libraries, like Documents, Videos and even the Desktop folder.
So what happens if you delete the Users folder and including that AppData folder? Well,
that's we're going to go over and of course, do it while Windows is running. Otherwise,
what fun would it be? Now, obviously, do not do this on your own computer.
As you'll see, it's going to pretty much break everything. It's going to at least
corrupt the user profile and probably even corrupt
the entire Windows installation to the point where you would have to do a clean install.
I'm personally going to be doing this in a virtual machine, so it's safe.
So first, let's take a quick look through the Users folder and see what actually is in here that
we're going to be destroying. Each user account will have a folder within the Users folder,
and the only account on this machine is simply called "user."
So don't get confused there. There's also the Public folder, which is shared between all users
and the Default folder, which acts like a template for new accounts. Now,
within a user folder, one of the main things is it's going to be the default location for all the
libraries on your computer, for example, Documents, folders, Pictures, those are
all libraries. And it's going to be in here. It's also going to contain the
Desktop folder. So anything on your desktop is actually in this folder. Deleting it is
probably not going to be good for it. And, of course, the all important AppData folder,
which is kind of like the Program Files folder, except for an individual user.
If you ever go to install a program and you select "Install Just For Me", it's going to be
installed into the AppData folder, along with all sorts of other user settings and program
settings specific to you. And it's going to have a lot of Windows stuff in there.
So even though these aren't necessarily core Windows files in the Windows directory,
these are still very important files. So now that we know what's going on, let's go ahead and
start deleting stuff, starting with the Desktop folder. I was genuinely curious what would happen.
Now, it turns out you are able to just go ahead and delete the desktop folder.
There's nothing that's stopping you, although it might pop up an error that
the folder location is missing. But it was surprisingly easy. Interestingly,
the Recycle Bin still actually does show, even though there is no desktop folder.
But some other interesting things I realized is if you try to right click and do stuff,
for example, opening the Terminal to the desktop location or creating a new folder,
it just won't do that. However, if you do drag and drop a folder on to
the desktop and copy it onto it, it will actually recreate the Desktop
folder and put it in there after the Desktop folders deleted. Let's just go through and
delete all the other library folders. All of these folders were also surprisingly
easy to delete. There was not really any resistance. And nothing really happened.
Now, we're basically just left with the AppData folder. Though,
that's where the vast majority of the files are anyway. Now, like I said, there's some important
stuff in here and quickly browsing through it, it's more than just program settings and things.
You can see there are things like account pictures, and
there is the actual library properties. So not just the library folders,
but actually the properties defining those libraries. So deleting this is definitely
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So definitely check it out. And with all that being said,
let's continue. So now of course, let's try and delete AppData. Now once I hit Delete,
it actually did look like it was going to try and start deleting everything.
But at the end, it said that some things were in use, and I don't think it even
deleted anything. So what I instead try to do is use the command prompt command
rmdir, which is short for "Remove Directory", AppData and then /s for including subdirectories.
Now you can see a bunch of line messages saying that a bunch of files could not be processed. But
I believe for the most part, the majority were. But there still is a lot left. Now,
one thing I did notice immediately after running this is that the desktop background
turned black completely, and all the icons, like in
the taskbar, disappeared and went blank. So obviously things are starting to break
already. I also noticed a lot of the error messages were because the files were open in
OneDrive. So I ended OneDrive, and that did allow me to run it again and delete
quite a bit more files, although there are still obviously a lot
remaining, so we're not done yet. Next, a restarted Windows
Explorer to see if it would fix anything or maybe even just crash and not reopen.
And it did reopen, but it didn't actually fix anything. The icons are still gone.
And also actually clicking on any of the icons in the taskbar don't work,
including the shortcut to Windows Explorer. And actually trying to open it through the
start menu didn't really work either. But then I remembered you still can
open it through the command prompt or just running it through task manager.
So at this point, I pretty much just try and go through and delete everything I can.
There are some sticking points. Sometimes if it won't let you delete an entire
folder, I can go in and delete most of the folders in there.
And anything that's left we can manage later. I was able to delete the entire Default and
Public user folders. It didn't give me any push back there. And actually I was pretty
much overall able to delete almost everything except some places in the Local AppData folder.
And funnily enough, if I go and delete the LocalLow folder,
the one folder that keeps getting remade is Internet Explorer. I thought it was not even
being used anymore, but apparently it is. And the same type of thing happens in the
Roaming folder when I go to delete, for example the Microsoft folder,
it can delete it, but then it immediately gets remade. So what I'll do instead is change the
folder permissions of the Roaming folder. So basically things can be deleted from it,
but nothing else added back in. So I went through and did all that.
I'm not going to explain how. Because it would take kinda long. And also,
I don't want people accidentally ruining their computer by doing it. But you can
see now after deleting the Microsoft folder, it now does not come back.
And also, the reason I can't delete the entire Roaming folder yet is because if I do,
then Windows will just completely remake it and give it self permissions again to
write to it. So now that I know that works with changing the permissions,
I can go ahead and do that in all the other folders that was giving me
trouble with things being remade. So why don't we click around Windows and see how
this is affected things. So if I try to run some programs like Microsoft Edge
or Office or MS Store through the Start menu or anything, it does not do anything.
The Edge window doesn't even appear. Neither does the Microsoft Office window. The Microsoft Store
does sort of appear at first, but then immediately crashes. However, even though almost nothing runs,
Microsoft Paint does, because that's in System32, so anything else in there would
as well probably like Notepad. But some other things that are not working are a
lot of these settings, specifically personal settings for that user account. So if I go
into the Personalization Settings and try to change the desktop background,
it actually does let me change it to a solid color, it will let me do that.
But if I try to change it to a picture, it just kind of glitches out and then goes back
to forcing me to use a solid color option. So obviously some things are kinda wonky in
here. And then while doing all this, all of a sudden I got an interesting error message.
It said "Critical Error. Your start menu isn't working. We'll try to fix it
for you next time you sign in." Now, I have never seen this error message before,
this totally new to me. Even in past videos when I was deleting critical system files and stuff,
never did this pop up before. So this is kind of an interesting one. Now,
it only gives the option to sign out, there's no close out button or anything,
but we don't want to do that yet, we're still working here.
So I'll just kind of move it over to the side. And obviously the start menu doesn't exactly
work anymore. But the search bar and stuff in the taskbar kind of does. But the things that it's
linking to don't. So, so-far it's kind of interesting that Windows itself is still running,
it hasn't crashed yet. But pretty much anything that uses any individual user
settings or anything that's installed for a particular user obviously is not. Next up,
to deal with some of the files and folders that say they're in use,
what we can do is go into the task manager and try to find those programs and services and
end them and then try to delete it again. So, for example, I went and found the
"YourPhone" process running. And ah look, now I can delete that one "YourPhone"
folder in the packages folder. Another of these folders mentioned searching.
So I went and found the Search App and task manager and ended that. So
then I decided to just kind of end a whole bunch of programs. And after doing that,
I was able to finally delete the final package folder.
So I guess I had ended something that was using it. One of the more stubborn folders was this
"UnistoreDB" folder. So that was actually in use by a service I found out, not a
process. So I opened the services and then went to
end it and it was actually in use by another service, but it ended
all of them. And then after ending those, I was able to delete the files in there. Next,
I went back into the Windows folder and tried to delete stuff,
and I was able to actually delete a lot more, but still not everything.
And I did actually find a couple more services that kept being mentioned when
deleting them so I went and found those and ended them,
and then deleted those files. Somehow I was able to now actually delete the thumbnail cache files.
So that's kind of interesting, I don't know what I did, but some did say they were in use by the
task manager, which is kind of weird. So I just add to the task manager for them and delete them.
But then I realized something, I'd forgotten that there might be some
hidden actual system files in these folders. And so what I did is you
can go to the folder options and not just enable hidden files and folders,
there's also "doubly hidden" files, which are system files that you can show. And yep, there
are some extra hidden system files in the user folder. And like in the local Microsoft folder,
though it does say they are in use by System if you try to delete them.
Then the Game DVR folder kept giving me trouble. It said it was open in Windows Explorer,
so I ended that and then was able to delete the files inside. But I still
couldn't delete the entire directory. It just says it's open in some program.
Again, I'll see if I can come back to that. So now in the user folders,
and the AppData folders, pretty much all we're literally left with is the Microsoft folder
with some Windows files, and in the also top level User folder,
some of those system files. So, for example, there's the UsrClass.dat files.
These are apparently the actual user configuration files used by windows.
So I don't fully expect to be able to delete these, but I certainly will try.
And the same goes with the NTUser.dat files in the top level User folder,
which are also shown as being in use by the System. But I do have one more
trick up my sleeve that we can try, which is a program called Unlocker.
There is a few of these type programs out there, where if a file is in use by something,
you can use this program to try and release it from that file.
So let's give it a shot and uh... Wow all right.
It actually worked. I'm kind of surprised to be honest. I didn't think you could stop
something from being used by the System, but we aren't done yet I guess. So now let's go
and try and handle some of these files and folders that were giving us trouble before.
For example, the Game DVR folder when I try to use the Unlocker on it. Well,
it crashed Windows Explorer. But when I go back in there, it now lets me delete it. So I guess it
worked. So now we can go ahead and tackle the final remaining files, the user system files.
So I'm going to go ahead and just try and unlock it, not delete it now.
And... it crashed the entire virtual machine. Uh oh, we might be done here because I don't know if
it's going to allow us to actually log back in and do anything, having deleted so much stuff.
Now, the virtual machine does boot up again, but it gives this really weird
error message and I can't sign in, so let's try and restart. But again, same thing it
says "Another session for your user is blocked notifying user profile service for zero minutes,
so we are unable to log you in. Do you want to force log off?" Now, I have no idea what any
of that means, so I just kind of actually let it just sit there for a while and did do something.
But then it kept us giving other weird error messages. But we can
still test a bunch of things and see how completely dead this really is.
So let's do a startup repair. I don't expect it to be able to fix it, but we'll still try.
And... after waiting a second yeah, it says couldn't repair. So I'm a little
bit disappointed so far that we couldn't delete EVERYTHING completely, but we got almost all of
it. But obviously, before you would even be able to, it would completely crash Windows anyway.
But we are not done yet because remember, that was a virtual machine. So it therefore has a
virtual hard drive. So what I can do is go into the disk manager of my main computer that was
running on and actually mount the virtual drive as a drive on my actual computer.
So going into the main drive, which is now mounted as P:
drive. I can actually go and just take ownership of all the files and folders so I can manipulate
everything. And then we can go ahead and look at those files we weren't able to delete.
And now since we're on the host computer and it's not running on anything,
I can delete them and see what happens. So that goes for the
files in the user folder, as well as the Microsoft folder that we couldn't before.
So we can go ahead and do that, delete all the remaining stuff,
and then boot up to see if it changes anything. And nope,
it does not still gives these same error message. So now we may as well do what we
promised in the title of video, which is just go back and mount it again and delete
the entire Users folder altogether, nothing left, and see if that does anything. So we do that and
then boot back into Windows and... nope, still the same thing nothing different. So this kind of got
me thinking. And NO, we're not done yet, because yes we do know the answer to that question.
What happens if you delete the User folder? Well, you can't log in again and you probably will have
to reinstall Windows. Not really surprised there. But is there any way to maybe have
Windows repair itself somehow? So the last thing I figure I can try is booting up into safe mode.
So we get to the login stage and hey, it's actually trying this time. And oh my gosh,
it's actually looking like it's going to log us in, though it does
have the whole "first time boot up" sequence going.
So it says the usual, we're getting things ready, please wait blah, blah,
blah. So maybe at this point it's even recreating all the user folders and stuff that we deleted,
maybe we'll see. However, after a little while it started saying
"it's taking a bit longer than expected, but we'll get there as fast as we can".
So I'm kind of wondering if this is going to finish at all. So I just got up and walked away
for about ten minutes, came back and it was just a black screen. And also it was completely frozen.
So I had to force shutdown the virtual machine. But let's open back up that virtual machine
and kind of see what it did. So we can go and look at the Users folder and well, zero bytes.
So it created the Users folder again, but literally put nothing back into it.
So it didn't actually fix anything. So yeah, that installation of Windows is basically done-for.
And now you understand what happens if you try and delete even part of the User folder.
Things start to break, and then by the time you delete the whole thing,
Windows is going to crash and your computer is not going to
work anymore. So thanks again to Unbounce for sponsoring this video. Again,
be sure to click the link in the description
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Be sure to check it out. So hopefully you found this video fun and interesting,
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want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is the one I mentioned before,
talking about what exactly is that AppData folder anyway.
So I went into a lot more detail explaining things, and you can watch that right there.
So thanks so much for watching guys, and i'll see in the next one.