Well, it's time for another computer experiment, where I try to do things
you should absolutely not do to your own computer. I'm ThioJoe, and in the past I've
done stuff like deleting the System32 folder, or deleting the Windows and AppData folder,
stuff like that. But what about those Program Files folders you've probably seen?
There's actually more to it than just programs you've installed, there's actually some important
Windows files in there. So we're gonna find out what happens if you delete them,
while Windows is running, of course. That's the fun part. And actually the result for
this one was pretty hilarious. I was not expecting it, so I think you'll like this.
As always, I am doing this in a virtual machine. So again,
do not ever do this on your own computer. As you'll see, it basically will ruin it. Alright,
so quickly for some context, first let's take a look at what's actually in these folders. Now,
I'm running Windows 11 Pro, and of course I've enabled Hidden Files and Folders,
as well as System Files and Folders, so we can see everything.
So the three folders we're dealing with today are the "Program Files" folder,
the "Program Files (x86)" folder, which has 32-bit files in there,
and then the "ProgramData" folder, which is related. I'll explain that in a second. So
first looking in the Program Files folder, this is for a clean installation of Windows.
If you have other stuff installed, obviously it's gonna mess with those too. But as you can see,
it's mostly just some pre-installed Windows software here. Shouldn't be
too critical for most of these, like Windows Mail, Media Player,
Photo Viewer. I don't think this is gonna destroy Windows deleting those.
But there are some other folders that seem like they might cause some issues,
like Windows Defender, Windows PowerShell, the Common Files folder, which has stuff
like Microsoft Shared and System. These seem kind of important. Also WindowsApps, I can't
even look into this one normally, so I had to actually set myself as the owner for these files,
and it looks like there's some install packages or manifests for those pre-installed files in here.
Everything from Bing News to Sticky Notes, Windows Terminal,
and Notepad. One thing to note though is I don't believe these are installed here,
it's just some manifests and info about the installation. Now if we go to the other
Program Files x86 folder, you can see it's a lot of the same stuff as the other one.
We see Windows Mail again, Photo Viewer. I guess these programs have both 64 and
32-bit stuff in there, so it's in both folders. There also seems to
be folders in here that look like they might be important, like Common Files,
as well as the Microsoft folder. Though this one just seems to have Edge browser stuff, we'll see.
And finally we can take a look at the ProgramData folder, which isn't where programs are installed,
but it just contains data that all users will be using in relation to a program. So it's not the
installation, it's maybe where settings files and stuff will go that will apply
to all users. Now several of these are empty, like the SSH folder, the SoftwareDistribution.
There's this "regid1991..." Folder which just has one file. But there are some other
interesting ones that I'm not 100% sure about. USOShared and USOPrivate, seems to stand for
"Updated Session Orchestrator", though these are mostly empty. And then the Packages folder
again. And then going back though, we have the Microsoft folder, which seems to contain some
important-looking folders that weren't in the other ones, such as the Windows folder,
I would think that's important, it has stuff even like about the Start Menu.
So I think if we delete this, it might mess some stuff up with the Start Menu,
we'll see. And then AppRepository, this seems to be yet more packages.
So let's actually get to the fun part. So first I tried deleting Program Files.
I tried just deleting it all at once. Of course, that's not going to be that easy. Right away,
the TrustedInstaller permissions blocked it, which is basically the
highest permission level on Windows. So I figured let's go inside, see what we can
delete in there individually. And it did let me delete some when I selected all of them.
I did try to delete the others individually, but again, it wouldn't let me do that. To get access,
I even tried setting myself as the owner for all these files by changing the security permissions,
but nope, that didn't work. So this is turning out to be
tougher than I expected. But finally, I tried a tool called Advanced Run.
This is a Nirsoft program, which can let me run as elevated users. So I ran the Command Prompt
as TrustedInstaller, which we saw before, and then tried doing the command to delete "Common
Files" just as a test. And boom, finally, it just went away. So then I tried the command
just on the entire Programs Files folder, and it went through and it said some were access denied.
But if we look inside, there's only a couple folders left, so it was mostly
successful. We have the Windows Defender left. Not surprised, there's probably some
extra protections for that folder, as well as WindowsApps. We'll deal with that later. Now,
before deleting more stuff, let's click around Windows and see if anything is messed up yet.
So the Start Menu seems to look normal, Edge still opens up. The
Microsoft Store does not open when I click it in the taskbar. All right,
that's one thing to note. And trying to run stuff like the calculator from the Start Menu,
also not working, interestingly. So now let's take a crack at the Program Files x86 folder.
Again, I'll just select it all and try and delete it the old fashioned way. And again,
it deletes a few, but not most of them. So this time, again, I tried the "Take
Ownership" thing on all folders, and it does make me do a UAC prompt for every
single one. But when I tried deleting Common Files in here, it actually worked this time.
So I was able to just delete that. And then it seems like most of the
other ones are working when I delete it. Though the Microsoft folder won't,
we can save that for later. So we're basically just left with the Microsoft folder and the
Windows Defender folder. In the Microsoft folder, it's mostly Edge stuff, and it said it was in use.
So I looked in the Task Manager, tried ending the process in there, although it still wouldn't work.
It still was in use, so I'll save that for later. And then I'm also going to leave the
Defender folder again. I think that probably has extra permissions built in. So again,
we can just kind of mess around with Windows, see if anything has changed.
And more stuff seems to be not working in the Start Menu, like Notepad, Clock,
Movies & TV. Although these might not have worked before, I didn't actually check these.
Even Terminal won't start. So while the programs seem to be all broken, it seems
like Windows itself is still fine and dandy. So maybe deleting ProgramData will mess that up.
And actually in ProgramData, it let me delete a lot more
than the others. There's only three folders left. Microsoft, Packages,
and USOShared. In Packages, I was able to delete most inside. There's only a few left,
probably because these are in use. So I ended the Teams app, and then I could delete that one.
I ended Terminal, but still can't. It says it needs a System permission. And then
in the Microsoft folder, by selecting all folders, I could delete a decent amount more, there's only
11 folders left now. Though it seems like most left here either need permission from System or
are also in use. Going back to the Program Files x86, I wanted to see again about the Edge folder.
So I noticed it says in the Task Manager that the web processes are used by the
widgets. So I ended that process, and now I could delete those Edge folders,
and so that's the last of the Microsoft folder. Then going back into Program Files, I was able to
delete more of the WindowsApps folders, and seems like just Terminal is not letting me do it still.
So after deleting all of that, now let's see if anything is broken in Windows.
So the Start Menu actually opened up for a second and looked empty,
but then it immediately crashed. And now it won't open, and nothing happens
when I click it. And then I realized actually the entire desktop is frozen.
Clicking on nothing works, though not the entirety of Windows is frozen. I was still able to bring
up the Task Manager with the shortcut for that. So I tried restarting explorer.exe,
and that actually worked. I can now even open up the Start Menu again,
although the taskbar seems to be missing some icons.
But I want to see if we can break it even more. So I'm going to try running the command prompt
as the System user using Advanced Run again. This still seems like it can't delete a lot,
but a lot of it is because it's in use. So it seems like we will with a little bit
of effort. So to deal with the files that are in use, I decided to use the PowerToys tools.
That is a suite of tools published by Microsoft,
and specifically one of them is called File Locksmith, which will show you what files
are being used by what programs, and then lets you end those tasks. And interestingly,
it still had no problem installing software, although I realized that just went into the
Program Files folder that we're trying to delete, but we can leave that alone for now.
So we can go back to the Search folder for example, and File Locksmith is telling me
that the Search Indexer is using that. So I end the task, and now it actually
does let me delete it. But then I realized it's going to just keep creating it again,
so I'll come back to that. I'll try some more that are in use, like the AppRepository.
It says it's in use by the "AppX" Service, so I go into the list of services, stop that,
and now I can delete that. There's some more in use by the "State Repository Service", so again,
stop that and delete it. I tried to finish off the Packages folder, but it said they were in use and
wouldn't tell me by what, and then I realized it was just creating those other files again.
So I decided to get kind of clever and change the permissions of these folders,
so that I as the user was able to access it and delete it, but the system did not have
permission to write to it, so it can't recreate anything. So now it indeed was
not recreating anything, although now the indexer is messed up and Explorer is frozen.
I guess because it can't index the files or read what's in here. I don't know, something's
messed up. And then the whole desktop just keeps crashing, can't really do much here, it basically
seems stuck. So obviously nothing is working here, so I decided to do a forced reboot,
and when it powers back on, there is no background to the login screen or anything.
It still lets me log in though, it just took a little bit. But now once I get in,
the Taskbar looks kind of weird. It's the old Windows 10 Taskbar. There's nothing in the system
tray. I try clicking on the Start Button, it just says "Critical Error." There's not even an option
to cancel, it just wants me to sign out, but let's just move that dialog box out of the way for now.
I try to open up Windows Explorer, maybe it's working now, and I noticed something weird.
This is not the Explorer I was using before, this is the Windows 10 Explorer! So for some
reason it seems like Windows reverted to the Windows 10 Taskbar and the Windows 10 Explorer,
because basically Windows 11 is built upon Windows 10, has that still in the background,
so I guess it kind of reverts to it if something goes wrong.
Going back into those folders, it does look like it recreated a good amount of
them again. But since the Search Indexer was the thing that probably broke it last time,
let's test and do a search. It seems to be doing it, but no results are coming up, so it's probably
still not working. So then I bring up the Task Manager, and it's the Windows 10 Task Manager too!
We've literally broken Windows so bad that it downgraded itself to a previous version.
So then I figured alright, well let's try one more time to keep deleting stuff. But
as soon as I right clicked, it just started spinning the cursor, and nothing happened.
Explorer froze and stopped responding. Right click still works on the desktop,
and I tried another Explorer window, maybe it was a fluke, but nope, same thing.
So because I can't even right click properly,
I think we can officially declare this Windows installation as ruined. But then I was thinking,
I wonder if there's a way to actually recover this and fix Windows, so let's see if we can
do that. First I tried the trusty System File Checker command, so the "sfc /scannow",
and it did say it found some files that were corrupted, and said it fixed them.
And when I went to look at the log file... but when I tried to hit edit,
it wouldn't open in Notepad, because it thought that it was not installed anymore,
because the package manifest was gone. Although I knew Notepad is still in System32,
so I went in there and opened it through that. So looking through the log file,
it seems like there's a bunch of lines talking about repairing files in all the
folders we messed with, like ProgramData, Program Files, you can see it's repairing all of these.
So I decided alright, let's restart, see what happened. But still no background for the login,
the Taskbar still is messed up, still can't right click in ProgramData, still messed up. So then I
try a command called DISM, this often goes hand in hand with the System File Checker. Basically,
it makes sure that the files that System File Checker are using are correct.
So I ran that, but that seems to get frozen at just 60% or so. So I closed that,
ran System File Checker again, but this time it said there was a bunch of files that couldn't
be repaired. Then I went back and forth trying the DISM and sfc again a couple times,
and I restarted one last time, but it doesn't seem to have any improvement.
It's still all messed up, I can't even right click on other folders that we didn't touch in here,
like the Windows directory. So it's not just the ones we messed with. So the final idea I
figured I'd try is since I messed with the permissions, and that seems to really have
been the last straw, there is a command to reset the permissions of folders in Windows.
And that is the "ICACLS", and I ran it for all three of the folders. And it actually
said that it succeeded on some of them, and failed on the others. Though maybe the
failed ones were ones that were already fine. So yet again, I restart Windows,
and oh wow, there is actually a background to the login screen now,
maybe we're on the right track. The taskbar still isn't fixed,
but I can actually now right click on stuff in the Explorer again. But it still looks
like the apps are missing too. So then I run sfc again, and this time it says
no integrity violations found, that's kind of odd. I run DISM again, then sfc again.
Both of them think it's all good. However, it still obviously is messed up. For example,
when I run the Start Menu, it still says critical error, that sort of thing. So I am officially out
of ideas on how to fix this, I'm going to declare it ruined. So basically, even though Windows
was able to keep running through all this, it was not really usable by the end of it.
But I still find it really funny that it started just looking like Windows 10 again,
I didn't expect that. Definitely the point that really messed with it was when I was
changing the permissions, which didn't allow it to recreate the files that I was deleting.
And I think that really tripped it up. But it's really weird that even after running the System
File Checker and DISM, which I thought would fix permissions anyway, I thought it did that.
And then I explicitly ran the fix permissions command. Even though it improved it,
it still didn't fix it completely. So yeah, obviously don't do this. You'd
probably have to do a clean install to fix it for sure. So anyway, if you enjoyed this video,
definitely give it a big thumbs up. And let me know down in the comments what you thought,
and if you have any ideas for stuff I should try in a future video. If you want to keep watching,
I'll put a couple of previous "What If" videos here, like where I deleted System32,
as well as the AppData folders. Those are pretty fun as well. So you can just click
on those right there. So thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.