How to Clear Temporary Files in Windows 10?
Then let me clear your doubt, it is not always because of the heavier sized files like few GBs of movies or software, rather the humongous collection of small-sized files. One of those kinds are Temporary files or shortly termed as TEMP files.
What do they do? And how the hell were they created in the first place? It’s quite a relevant question, but you need to know few more additional things to understand that.
Temporary files are created by third-party tools, applications in your Windows temporarily for their active operation. Once the activity is done, these files are an only unwanted piece of junk.
There are various other types of temporary files like leftover files, corrupt and error reporting DLL files, upgrade logs, Windows temporary installation files, and many more.
Typically, however, these files won’t cause any harm to your system. But as they continue to accumulate in huge amount in a specific folder named “Temp” folder the valuable space on the hard drive starts to decrease. This prevents Windows from installing new utilities, or you find it difficult to accommodate large-sized files on your hard disk.
In this article, we will primarily keep the discussion restricted to the temporary files of Windows 10 alone. And fortunately, Windows 10 offers many safe ways to get rid of these junk files to free up space.
The topics that we are going to cover here are listed in the table below.
Table of Contents:
- Clear Temporary Files using Windows Settings
- Clear Temporary Files using Disk Cleanup
- Clear Temporary Files Manually
Method #1: Clear Temporary Files using Windows Settings
On Windows 10, you can utilize the Windows Setting’s app to clear the temporary files. But the steps are a bit exasperating. So it’s better if you follow the step by step guideline ordained below:
Step 1. Open “Settings” app from the “Start” menu.
Step 2. Click on the “System” icon from the home page.
Step 3. Click on the “Storage” option on the left side panel of options.
Step 4. Next; on the right-side panel under the Storage category, click on the drive where the Windows OS is installed. You can get it quickly by checking the disk with a Windows logo next to it.
Step 5. After you click on the particular system drive, the next page will be the storage usage page. It displays the different types of files the disk stores, and the exact space used by the files, like games and apps; documents; pictures; system files; reserved files, etc.
Step 6. Just go down the list and click on “Temporary Files” which is our fundamental concern here.
Step 7. Next; on the “Temporary files” operating page, check the checkbox adjacent to “Temporary Files” and click on “Remove Files” button at the bottom of the page.
This will delete all the Temporary files once and for all.
Method #2: Clear Temporary Files using Disk Cleanup
If your computer notifies that it is running out of space, you should not take such alerts for granted.
Instead of going into the details of Windows settings, you can also use the Disk Cleanup tool already pre-installed within the Windows OS to free up space. It actually means the eradication of the Temporary files.
This is how you do it.
Step 1. Go to the “File Explorer” and click on “This PC” option.
Step 2. Simply right-click on the disk where the Windows 10 OS is installed and select “Properties” from the context menu.
Step 3. Choose the “Disk Cleanup” button.
Step 4. Click on “Cleanup system files” and then check the items that you wish to delete. If you want to delete the Temporary files, then you should check the options like, “Temporary Windows installation files”; “Temporary Internet Files”; “System Created Windows Error Reporting”; “Windows upgrade log files”, etc.
Step 5. Once you are done with your selection, click on the “Ok” button and click “Delete files” to finish the task.
Once the entire process is done, restart your computer to give it a fresh start.
Method #3: Clear Temporary Files Manually
In this approach, we would discuss the traditional or manual way of accessing the “Temp” folder within the local disk folder and deleting the items from there directly.
The steps for the task are lined out below:
Step 1. Press “Windows + R” to open up the “Run” search panel.
Step 2. In the search box, enter “%temp%” command and hit “Enter”. It will automatically open up the Windows “Temp” folder. This approach saves you the trouble of searching for the particular Temp folder in the local disk.
Step 3. Select all the items in the Temp folder and press “Shift + delete” to clear the items forever leaving no footprints behind.
You cannot budge few files to deletion. It may indicate that they are necessary currently for any application or task that is actively running in the backdrop. So leave those items untouched.
Conclusion:
You must repeat the act periodically to keep your system space in perfect condition. Not only this task frees up your hard disk space, it enhances the system performance as well.
So whenever you feel like your system is behaving oddly, working intermittently, or unable to store any extra files. Give it a disk clean up or a manual cleansing at least to remove the Temporary files.
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