Here is what happened in a nutshell:
I let my brother use my laptop to work on an arduino programming project of his, and I don't know what he did exactly but every time I tried to upload a program from the IDE to my board, I would get this error:
espcomm_upload_mem failed. There was also something about exceeding some kind of memory limit but I do not understand what or where or why this is (I am only minimally computer literate 
)
My attempts to understand what was going on thru the magic of googling ended up fruitless.
I do not have screenshots of the error unfortunately and am unable to make one because of what I have tried to do in an attempt to fix the original problem: first I tried uninstalling and re-installing the IDE, but the error kept coming up. So I figured it must have something to do with the other files that the IDE uses on my computer, and so I proceeded to delete every file I could find having to do with arduino. There are still a few left but these require system permission so I figured it's probably best to leave them be. I thought I would be able to re-install with a clean slate after this, but when I attempt to run the installer via this site, it says I already have it and it needs to be uninstalled. When I try to uninstall it, it says the uninstaller cannot be found. I guess I must have deleted it.
Attached is a screenshot of what the installer says and what my operating system says when I do this.
