How do I make my home computer run faster?
In last month’s newsletter, we provided directions on how to uninstall undesired programs. Keeping your list of installed software lean and mean helps minimize hard disk drive utilization and often helps your computer start faster. Today we’d like to suggest a second activity you can do after uninstalling unnecessary software that may help overall speed and will help save hard drive space: delete your temporary files.
Our Systems Administrator Walter Lawrence recently discovered a computer with over 500 GB of temp files. This large accumulation of files caused so much slowness that it actually took him over 20 minutes to delete all the files. As soon as the files were purged, the computer ran noticeably faster.
Your web browser stores lots of temp files and generally does a good job of self-maintaining its cache. So, in this article, we’re going to focus on system temporary files used by all your other software.
There are two main locations where Windows programs typically store temp files. Here’s how to manually clean them both:
- Restart your computer so you’re beginning with a fresh start.
- Press the Windows key + R to open the Run dialog.
- In the “Open” box, type “c:\windows\temp” (without the quotes) and click OK. This will open Windows Explorer.
- Press Ctrl+A to highlight all the files, then press the Delete key.
- Follow the prompts to say, yes, you’re sure you want to Continue and delete all the selected files. If a file is in use, it’s OK to Skip it (and skip all the current items in-use).
- Close Windows Explorer and press the Windows key + R again.
- This time in the “Open” box, type “%temp%” (without the quotes). This will open Windows Explorer again to the other big jackpot of temp files.
- Repeat steps #4 and #5, then close Windows Explorer again.
That’s it! If you have multiple accounts on a computer, know that everyone shares the temp file location in step #3, but each user should log in and follow steps #6 and #7 since that temp file location is unique for each user, and some users will have more temp files than others.
You may notice your PC is now running a little faster. After you reboot and verify everything is working, you can Empty your Recycle Bin to reclaim free disk drive space.
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