I was in the process of installing and uninstalling MSI Afterburner, and while uninstalling it, I flipped through my files quickly and saw ‘windowsdesktop-runtime-8.0.11-win-x64’ in my pictures folder. A few Google searches hinted at malware and suspicious activities related to this, but some of the websites seemed sketchy, so I didn’t dive deep. I mistakenly opened the file and saw something about ‘.NET’ in purple and white. When I tried to uninstall it, it wouldn’t go away. I deleted it from my folder, but I don’t know if that counts as uninstalling it. I need help figuring out if this is malware or if I need to uninstall it. Notably, this appeared around November 11th, and since then, my laptop’s performance has tanked. My fans are running for simple tasks, and it usually performs better than this.
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That is .NET Framework 8.0, and it’s normal to have. It’s not malware; it’s part of Windows that you can update with that runtime file from the Windows website.
While it’s true that executable files shouldn’t normally go in the Pictures folder, I think this happened because you might have mistakenly saved it there while downloading. The file ‘windowsdesktop-runtime-8.0.11-win-x64.exe’ is the installer for Microsoft .NET 8.0 Desktop Runtime 8.0.1, and it’s safe. Once installed, you can’t uninstall Microsoft .NET Runtimes since they become part of the Windows system.