The user temp folder is considered a windows operating system folder but unlike
the temporary internet file folder which internet explorer in the advanced section
lets you delete and manage, the user temp folder is hidden from view and
has no house cleaning equivalent the average user can access.
Windows allows applications to freely use this folder and does not attempt to interfere,
it is used as temporary place to hold your work in the current session until
you save it to disk. Sometimes the applications that create these temporary
files are unable to close and delete them properly and the folder begins to fill
up with garbage, other times a temporary file will be become corrupted causing the
otherwise normally running application to crash. Sometimes the application crash
only occurs when a particular document is opened, this can be caused by a corrupted
temporary file that was created when the document was last saved.
Cleaning up this
temp folder and deleting all the contents including sub folders often speeds up
applications and solves document problems including some related to outlook and
exchange email problems.
How to get to the temp folder?
First you have to make the folder viewable as by default its hidden. In order
to do this click on my computer from your desktop or start menu. In the menu bar at the very top click on Tools. In the drop
down menu click on Folder Options. In
folder options click on View. On the list that appears click the option button that
says
Show hidden files and folders
, then select okay to leave this area.
Next to get to the temp folder. Each user account has its own temp folder, for
most cases there will only be one user. The direct way to find your temp folder
is to (Right) click on
the Start button lower left on your screen, select explore,
this will open a windows file explorer tree starting at your own start menu folder, above it you will see a
set of folders with familiar names like 'Desktop' this contains the actual
desktop items you've saved to your desktop, or 'Favorites' this contains all the
links you've saved in favorites using Internet Explorer. 'MyDocuments' contains
all the documents you've saved in my documents. Moving further up the tree
you will also see that these folders are under your particular login name under Documents and Settings.
There is also now a folder here called 'Local Settings' (Normally hidden from
view). Expanding this folder, inside you will find your temp folder.
As long
as you've have closed down your applications its safe to delete every file and folder
inside the temp folder! Windows itself needs nothing in this folder.
Do not however delete anything from the other folders like Application data.
If you look at the contents of the temp folder you may see
items dating
back to last year in there including sub folder names, get rid of all of it. This is why its called the
Temp folder these are all just temporary files some used only once while you were
working. The only files in the temp folder that windows won't let you delete are
files that are currently open and being used by the system, so I've found that by
organizing the files here by date and deleting those older files that were not just
created today has the best result. Sometimes there can be hundreds of files and
sub folders here and it can take a while to clean them up. For some folders you must delete the contents of
the folder before you can delete the folder itself. When deleting a large
number of files if only one is in use it will stop the remaining delete request.
So target the older files first. For best results
work in details view and organize by date. To use details view click on View on
the menu bar, select Details. Click on the date modified tab to sort the files by
date.
Rebooting the computer clean without starting any applications has the best result
in cleaning the temp folder quickly with out interuptions. Make sure to reboot again after you've cleaned
out the folder.
A little bit of care needs to be excercised to insure that you only delete
files or folders located in the temp folder itself and not anywhere else while viewing
these hidden files. Make sure your work is saved and backed up, you may wish to
disable the show hidden files option above until you need it again.