How and why to clean out temporary windows files?

Roger DeReu: Hi this Roger DeReu my website is FreeComputerConsultant.com. Today what I want to talk about was temporary files. Recently I have had several of clients that have machines that just don't seem to act right.

People actually think there are you know hung up trying to say open a PDF file with the Adobe acrobat reader and what this really going is the machine is just very, very busy. And the reason it can't be busy is because there are temporary files that are not been cleaned by a programs or system crashes. And some times those temporary files can accumulate very large numbers.

On a recent machine I saw the number of temporary files approaching 65,000 files in the temporary directory. And what was happening was when adobe acrobat was trying to open a PDF that will go into that temporary folder and it would try to write a file, but the file handling was just -- was so much overhead because of all those files it appear like the machines was locked up.

So I'm going show you is how to delete the temporary files. And first how to view them to find that might be a problem. Now if you don't where you temporary files are stored, you can open a command prompt, I have one of my desktop. If you don't have one of the desktop, you can simply go to Start, Run and type in CMD, give your command window and you can type a set that shows you all the system variables. Two of which have to a temporary files one is TEMP and one TMP. Although that's kind of out of date never not to use the machines more, because see you I have said that to be an alternate directory from that windows normally makes that, I don't really care for having multiple users on a machine at the same time, well I did the same time might possible would be conflict.

So as really is to get out of here and clean it out and find out what's going on. I'm got to search a directory I've created called TEMP on the C drive and you can find it that's where are in this machine. It will opening windows explorer, where you can see the temporary directory and just has a one folder right now for this video capture, but were usually at Windows doesn't even show you, if you look at the documents setting or users, administrator and this is all you see by default.

If you go to tools, folder options, you are going to view and select show hidden files and folders, then you'll get all these other directories here and one of which is local settings and here is the default for Windows and there you can see that's kind of a long directory name it's not real easy to just pop in and navigate too, and that's why I much prefer having this order TEMP, but we are going to do here is how we can clean out those files that are stored there.

There are couple of ways, when I do like the free program CC cleaner and it will do that work for you are should say C cleaner and it'll clean out Windows temporary files, you'll see here is system temporary files, so I'll give really those for you that is free programs ccleaner.com. Some people think that they can get rid of it with just the standard windows Disk Cleanup and they are correct really this is kind of buried accessories system tools but by default it will not do that for you, you have to actually check the box. This takes just a moment.

Now you can see your temporary files is not selected by default, may be it would have been. I 'm seen it select by default, but may be suppose I keep my temporarys were clean, but some other thing is that aren't very bigger checks so presume it just not the default really ever. If you check that to get to do that C cleaner will do a better job and you also manually going here, I going here at the temporary directory and I can delete the files in here. There shouldn't ever been anything you really want, but you have to close that all elective programs before you do that and you still might come up with few files that can't be delete with on use and that can be, because may be got PDA that sinking or just a lot info software programs that could be running and have the temporary file but its still open.

So may be C cleaner is this really the best approach to do that. Once you rid of all those excessive temporary files you might find that your system operates much more quickly and this programs that appeared to be not working or a peer to lock up would now work and actually I really go into how to change the location of the temporary files in this video, I want to kind of keep this as short I can, that's may be topic for anther one. Do I hope you to visit my website FreeComputerConsultant.com hope you've enjoyed and found useful this video. Thanks for watching.