TMG-L Archives

Archiver > TMG > 2001-05 > 0988820714


From: "DeAnna Burghart" <>
Subject: RE: [TMG] Program Freeze
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 09:25:14 -0700
In-Reply-To: <3AF0101A.FC1667C@qwest.net>


What Terry said is a good guide. But I've found that anything can go,
because Windows will very cleverly not allow you to delete anything that you
need. If, for example, you do Ctrl+A to select everything and hit delete,
you might see several files get deleted and then receive a message that
"DF10039.tmp cannot be deleted. File is in use or is Read-Only." or some
such. (That's from memory.) You'll usually find that file at the top of the
current directory list. Just Ctrl+click to de-select that file only, and hit
delete again. Windows will continue blythely deleting files until it finds
one it needs and repeats the above.

If there's a folder there that is needed by some program, it'll be recreated
when it's needed again. Over time you'll notice which ones keep popping up
again and again.

Sometimes you'll see warnings about a file in TEMP being an executable file,
and do you *really* want to delete it because you won't be able to run that
program any more. The answer is an unequivocal Yes. This are usually files
left over from old program installations that didn't clean up after
themselves.

Cardinal rule: if it was *really* important, it wouldn't be in the temp
directory. Kill them all and let Microsoft sort them out. <eg>

Cleaning your temp directory won't eliminate all your crashes obviously. It
*is* Windoze, after all. But it will help A LOT. :)

DeAnna

-----Original Message-----
From: Maggie McQuillan [mailto:]
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 6:48 AM
To:
Subject: RE: [TMG] Program Freeze


DeAnna, in my \Windows\Temp file there are lots of Folders as well as
Files. Is it safe to delete *everything* in the temp folder, including
all those sub-folders? Is there ever anything in a temp folder that is
crucial that you would *not* delete? Do you only delete anything with
*.tmp extensions?
Maggie

DeAnna wrote:

In the directory C:\Windows\Temp you'll see a bunch of files that begin
with
~ and end in .tmp. The names don't really matter -- they're all bogus.
If
there are any files in there when you first start your computer, DELETE
THEM. Don't worry, you CANNOT hurt your system by doing this. I've seen
some
computers that had literally thousands of files in the temp directory
and
had gotten so bad that the owners couldn't even boot windows, let alone
start a program.




This thread: