Many software developers use Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 to write their programs. Instead of including the entire code library in their installer, they rely on Windows to have these "Redistributables" already installed. If you uninstall these, programs that depend on them (like older games or Adobe software) will crash.

At its core, is a set of runtime components. These are libraries that programs written in C++ (using Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2013) need to run on your computer.

To install and run Visual C++ 2013, the following system requirements must be met:

The page offers both vcredist_x86.exe and vcredist_x64.exe . If in doubt, install both.

Think of it like this:

You can find these installed by going to and searching for "Visual C++ 2013".