Roy Osherove

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Six things that will happen when you uninstall your MSDN documentation

someone asked in a mailing list if there are any repercussions to uninstalling MSDN documentation from their system, since it was taking such a long time to load on F1.

my answer:

  1. After uninstalling MSDN you will get the weird and uncomfortable feeling that things are running a bit smoother
  2. pressing F1, however, will still stall your system, though for a little bit less time. Everything else will continue to work just fine, as if MSDN docs never existed.
  3. you will also find that whatever it is you were looking for, the closest search engine (ehm google) will find a better match (sometimes within MSDN itself, but mostly much better than MSDN).
  4. Your hard drive will also contain a bit more space, which you can then use to install productive tools such as "everything" search engine, "TestDriven.NET" and Total commander :)
  5. you will continue to go through life wondering what would have happened if you had just stuck with MSDN a little bit longer
  6. but that sinking feeling will soon be replaced by the realization that most of the time, you just don't need to install MSDN anymore. It's almost irrelevant since the info is out there in the cloud anyway. and the fact that you can go get coffee if you accidentally press F1 doesn’t really help its case.