Let's talk about Temp files...

Submitted by Rick on February 21, 2006 - 9:56pm.

With today's gargantuan hard drives, we tend to get a little lazy about disk maintenance and keeping it clean of files we no longer need. I’ve included a picture (it's blurry, but it shows 101,000 files deleted to this point) of one computer I cleaned today…the final number of unneeded files cleaned was 345,871!!! 

One of the biggest culprits is temporary files. Temporary files are created by any Windows’ program you use (including games) and by your Internet programs as well. 

With Windows’ programs, in order to show us the images and perform the functions we ask of our computer, programmers need to open, close, create and delete files behind the scenes. We never notice or see these things happen because our programs are pretty well written. However, sometimes these files stack up and become a large burden on our hard drives and Windows itself.

Even a bigger culprit than program temporary files is Internet temp files. Every time you look at a web page (or even some email), the images and text and other files associated with each page you look at are stored on your computer as temporary files. Out of the box, Windows sets the amount of storage allocated to these temporary files way too high. Read my tip here on how to adjust this allocation and keep these files under control.

Here is a list of some tips on our site that address temp files and how to keep them at bay:

Remember also our free CleanUp! utility that we have linked in our “Links & Resources” section…it works great at keeping these files under control. Call us on Saturday if you are unclear about how to use it or download it.

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