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 going to cause some havoc. But before we
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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 or go to Unbounce.com/ThioJoe and use the code
THIOJOE for 20% off the first three months. Be sure to check it out. So hopefully
you found this video fun and interesting, if you did give it a thumbs up. And also let
me know what you think down the comments. If you do want to subscribe, you should also
click the bell next to the subscribe button, because I only make videos about twice a week, so you don't want that to get lost in
the rest of your subscriptions. If you 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.
