 | Randy Johnston
has been involved in computing for over 25 years. In addition to being a top-rated and entertaining speaker presenting technology seminars worldwide for K2 Enterprises (www.k2e.com), he is also Executive Vice-President and Co-owner of Network Management Group, Inc., a full-service computer networking and service company. Randy recently published Technology Best Practices for Wiley Publishing. You may contact Randy by e-mail at randyj@nmgi.com, or by phone at (620) 664-6000. |
Computers & Software
2002-06-01 14:42:00
Temporary files...
Question: For some reason I get a lot of temporary files created on my computer. About every two weeks I clean them out but there are around 5,000 or more each time I do. I just delete them then 'empty the trash'. What are temporary files? How and why are they created? Am I hurting anything to delete them all?
Answer: Temporary files are like the scratch pad of the applications that run on your computer. When an application is running, and needs some more space than it has available in main memory or RAM, the application will choose to write this information on your local hard drive. The applications are supposed to remember to delete all of these temporary files, but as you can see from your own experience, many applications are not doing a good job of cleaning up after themselves, a task in the computer industry known as housekeeping or garbage cleanup.Temporary files on your computer can make your computer run unreliably. That is why we have to take strategies to minimize them. Besides the applications that create these files by not doing their job correctly, temporary files can be created by applications that are doing their job in the way they were designed. For example, a web browser is supposed to bring files from web servers to your local computer so you can display them on the screen. These files are kept "temporarily" on your local hard drive in several places, including the disk caching for the web browser, as well as folders designed for temporary file storage. These temporary files consume a large amount of disk space, and are designed to be cleaned up easily. Internet Explorer, for example, has under the Tools, Internet Options menu the options; Delete files as well as Settings. You should look at the Settings to make sure your system is not taking more temporary file space for the web than you want (I suggest no more than 10% of the size of your hard drive). You should also occasionally delete the files to speed up your system performance. This seems to be a very safe clean up of temporary files.Another type of temporary file that can be on your system is created by the operating system itself. In the Windows environment, these files often have a name that begins with a tilde (~). The files may also have name extensions that begin with a tilde, the letters TMP or BAK. All files that have a TMP, BAK, or tilde extension or have a tilde at the start of the name can safely be deleted. In fact, your system will become more stable if you eliminate all of these files. We suggest cleaning all the temporary files off your system, powering down, cleaning all the temporary files again after reboot, and powering down one more time. Do this procedure again in a few days. You should find that your system becomes more stable if it has been prone to locking up.Speaking of locking up, a system freeze can be a major source of the temporary files. Utility vendors try to sell you products that make your system run faster, and one of the strategies they use is eliminating temporary files. Built into versions of Windows 98 and later, there is a Disk Cleanup tool under the Accessories, System Tools menu. This utility will clean up most of the extra files without a lot of manual labor using the search or find command looking for files that start with a tilde, then deleting those files, then looking for the TMP files and deleting those, emptying the recycle bin and so forth. If you have frequent lockups, it is a chicken or egg situation. Lockups create extra temporary files and extra temporary files can lead to more lockups. When your system locks up, you can be sure there are temporary files left behind. Make sure you clean your system on a regular basis to speed it up and make it more stable.
