Once you’ve been on a computer for a while, and used various operating systems, you’ll start to notice their various mannerisms. And one of the main things you’ll notice before long is the amount of temp files that Windows creates. It does this as part of the way it manages its day-to-day operations and we need not dwell on the technicalities.

Suffice to say that although Windows should automatically delete these temp files when it has finished with them, it sometimes forgets, and the problem you find is that all these temp files build up to such a degree that they can start to hog disk space and slow down your system.

So, occasionally, get rid of them. And at the same time, take the opportunity to dump a few more things as well; consider it a spring clean of your computer’s hard disk.

To start, click on My Computer (found on desktop, or start-up, on the right). Right-click on your C: drive (you might have two disks, or a portioned disk, so don’t forget those either) and click Properties (usually at the bottom of the dialog box). Find the small box Disk Cleanup and press. Now, depending on what version of Windows you’re running, you will be given a choice of things to remove, or first, a utility will run to see how much stuff you can remove.

Check the appropriate boxes next to the items you want to remove. As always when playing around with your computer, don’t be rash and remove things that you might need later. If in doubt, err on the side of caution. To help you, Windows gives you an explanation against each item you might want to remove, so this helps.

Once you have decided which ones to remove, click Yes.

In Windows XP and Vista you can set up this facility to operate automatically, but you might want to leave it under your manual control so to speak, to ensure that you don’t get rid of things you might need.

Deleting Temporary Files – Recap

• distinct mannerisms;
• temp files hog space on the hard disk;
• don’t remove files you might need.