Cleaning out temp files & folders

Question

I have an Inspiron 5000, with a 10 GB hard drive, that I recently had upgraded to XP from 98 SE. When I got the computer back I discovered I had just 1% of my hard drive left, insufficient to do anything with, let alone get my all-in-one printer working. I cleaned out a lot of programs, minimized the space my 2 greeting card programs used, & managed to get back to over 2 GB free on the hard drive. I regularly perform defrag & scandisk, empty temp folders, but it seems there are still a lot of temp files & folders that I am mostly unsure of & afraid to empty (to the most part). I deleted some of them & then discovered one of my card programs could no longer open a file from a disk. Had to uninstall & reinstall it. On the disk cleanup utility there are over 600,000 KB in the Windows 98/ME section, & almost 640,000 KB in backup files for previous operating system,  that come up everytime, though neither are actually checked. Are these safe to delete? Everytime I visit a document, make a greeting card or scan something, it seems more temp files are generated, how do you identify the ones that are safe to delete, when often you cannot see what is contained on these files. Already I am down to 1.81 GB free on my hard drive. Does anyone know the answer ?   Elfskip

Dream Master · Answer

I would grab a program called System Mechanic. It has never deleted anything extra which caused me problems. It can be found here:

http://www.iolo.com/

You can use it to clean out temp files, get rid of tracks you make using Internet Exporer, get rid of history files from document writing, and also to clean the registry without fear of trashing it. I have used it since version one without issues of any kind.

Hope this helps. 30 day free use I believe.

ELFSKIP · Answer

Thank you Gary, I'll try it! Merry Christmas  -  Elfskip

Dream Master · Answer

It won't hurt anything to run through all the cleaning tools one time, reboot, then run through them agaiun just to make sure it gets everything cleaned up.   Merry XMas to you and yours as well.

NS_MaNiAc · Answer

WindowsXP has a ton of Features to help with this problem. Run Disk Clean up and check EVERY Option. This will save you some disk space. Also if you search the web you will want to Delete the Temp junk it stores, and it stores quite a bit.

ELFSKIP · Answer

Thanks MaNiAc   On the disk cleanup utility there are over 600,000 KB in the Windows 98/ME section, & almost 640,000 KB in backup files for previous operating system,  that come up everytime, though neither are actually checked.  Because I upgraded  to Xp, & did not do a complete removal of 98 SE, before upgrading to XP , I am still  unsure if these files are safe to delete. I did not do the upgrade personally, so don't really know if it makes any difference.       and to Gary,   I tried to install Mechanic 5 & after downloading the trial version, I tried to open/install/run the program & got the error message :-  Systemmechanic5.exe is not a valid Win 32 application, so was unable to use the product.  Have a response from the company tech so will try to get it resolved.

Dream Master · Answer

Yes, delete those files. You no longer need them unless you plan to go back to Windows 98. I would delete everything disk cleanup finds.

Another method is to do a search for *.tmp and delete all of these as well. The system will not let you delete a few of them however. This is expected and ok.

ELFSKIP · Answer

Thanks Gary, I'll do it. Also managed to get Mechanic 5 installed & running - scary how many duplicate files there were - I deleted a bunch of the ones that allowed me to, excepting the ones that asked if I was sure, mostly dll. files relating to my HP printer, Norton, Sierra air card etc. don't know enough to know if it is safe to remove those. I do know that I know enough to be dangerous!!! Really appreciate your continued advice,

Have a safe & happy holiday Eileen

100mph · Answer

The following two features of Windows XP consume a significant amount of space: System Restore: up to 12% of HD space by default. Hibernation: Equal to the physical memory installed.

Windows General

Cleaning out temp files & folders

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