As you can see on the screenshot attached, I have both 32bit and 64bit entries of the same version of Visual C++ Redistributable. I have 64bit system.
Is this normal or I can remove 32bit version?
Also, do I have to have 2008, 2010 and 2012 versions installed at once, or is there backwards compatibility?
It's not unusual. Some programs will require different versions and uninstalling them might result in problems whey you go to run the software that requires them.
My 2c
Jeff
Its primarilly a developer tool the standard/regular would probobably not use it.
I removed it years ago on my W7, with no ill effects.
IF by any chance you download a programm that requires it, you will receive a pop-up saying its required and it can easily be downloaded from MS.
Roy
You should leave all of these items installed.
There is backward compatibility between versions but unfortunately many applications were written for a specific version and will work with no other. This is more complex than it might appear. It is possible that one or more items is not required for your situation but the amount of time necessary to determine this would be out of all proportion to the disk space saved.
The x86 and x64 versions are required for 32 and 64 bit applications respectively.
See this for more information:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...3a5bc88?auth=1
While I agree with most of the above (e.g. 32 and 64 bit versions of the same runtime are different and may be required by different programs), there still is one open question, which I also already asked myself in the past:
I understand that it might be necessary to have different versions installed at the same time, e.g. 2008 and 2010. However, in the screenshot csenger41 has the same version (2008, 32 bit) installed twice: Once as version 9.0.30729.17 and once as 9.0.30729.6161.
Is that necessary as well? After all it is the same software...
Each piece of software you install will also install it's own C++ run time. So by removing one of them that may seem to be a duplicate might mess up one piece of software you installed. When you try to run the program it will look for the specific C++ run time and when it doesn't find it .. it's going to crash.
It just makes sense to not to delete any of them.
On a 320 GB hard drive the space saved would be quite trivial and not worth the potential problems removal may cause.
Quote
)
