How to delete temporary files in Windows 10

Dur­ing var­i­ous oper­a­tions in Win­dows 10, such as installing appli­ca­tions, surf­ing the Inter­net, run­ning soft­ware, and so on, a lot of tem­po­rary files are cre­at­ed that can take up sig­nif­i­cant disk space and also con­tribute to a notice­able decrease in sys­tem per­for­mance. For this rea­son, our team of experts decid­ed to make a detailed guide on how to delete tem­po­rary files in Win­dows 10 with­out eras­ing impor­tant data.

Deleting temporary files manually

To delete tem­po­rary files on your own, you need to go to the “Temp” direc­to­ry by press­ing “Win + R” and exe­cut­ing “%temp%”, after which you can safe­ly erase all the con­tents here. The same applies to the “dri­ve with — WINDOWS — TEMP” fold­er, but impor­tant files of installed pro­grams may acci­den­tal­ly get here, as a result of which, after clean­ing it, some soft­ware may stop work­ing.

Very often, users are faced with the prob­lem of the impos­si­bil­i­ty of eras­ing any files, which can occur for many rea­sons, includ­ing:

1. expo­sure to mal­ware;

2. vio­la­tion of the integri­ty of the object;

3. block­ing by active process­es;

4. lack of access rights;

5. using Win­dows sys­tem object exten­sions, etc.

In this case, our experts rec­om­mend using a sim­ple Unlock­er util­i­ty that can stop block­ing han­dles and attached process­es if nec­es­sary, result­ing in the required file dele­tion, but some­times only after reboot­ing the OS. At the same time, this tool must be used with extreme cau­tion because of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of destroy­ing impor­tant areas of disk space, which can lead to the inevitable rein­stal­la­tion of the entire sys­tem.

Deleting via file storage

To erase tem­po­rary files in this way, you will need to click “Start” — “Set­tings” — “Stor­age” or “Win + I” and select the desired disk to clean, after which in the “Tem­po­rary files” sec­tion, check the box­es next to the items “Tem­po­rary files”, “Down­load Fold­er”, “Emp­ty Trash” and then click “Delete”.

Disk Cleanup utility

Sev­er­al work­flow algo­rithms can be used to apply this method, includ­ing:

1. typ­ing “Disk Cleanup” in the search area of ​​the Start menu;

2. exe­cut­ing the “clean­m­gr” com­mand via the “Win+R” call;

3. select­ing the “Prop­er­ties” sec­tion after right-click­ing on the select­ed disk.

Then it remains to put a tick on all the items from the list and click “Ok”. You can also try to do a pro­fes­sion­al cleanup by run­ning the com­mand %systemroot%system32cmd.exe /c clean­m­gr /sageset:65535 & clean­m­gr /sagerun:65535, as a result of which the list of areas to be removed in the Cleanup win­dow will increase sig­nif­i­cant­ly, but our experts do not it is rec­om­mend­ed to do this with­out pro­fes­sion­al expe­ri­ence in set­ting up the OS, since incor­rect actions here can lead to irre­versible changes to the sys­tem.

Setting up automatic deletion of temporary files

In the lat­est ver­sions of Win­dows 10 with the Cre­ators Update, a very use­ful fea­ture has appeared to auto­mat­i­cal­ly clean up unnec­es­sary objects, which are divid­ed into two or three points, depend­ing on the mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the OS, these are:

1. auto-delete of tem­po­rary files not used in appli­ca­tions;

2. items that have been in the trash for more than a month;

3. down­loaded files that have not been used for more than 30 days.

To enable this option, you need to open the “Stor­age” item of the “Set­tings” sec­tion, move the “Mem­o­ry Sense” slid­er to the on posi­tion and click “Change how we free up space”, where you need to check the box­es next to the desired actions. In addi­tion, it is pos­si­ble to per­form an imme­di­ate cleanup using the “Clear Now” but­ton locat­ed at the very bot­tom of this win­dow.

Also, some advanced users often resort to the option of cre­at­ing their own clean­ing files, for which you will need to open Notepad by request­ing it through the Start menu search bar, enter the com­mand — del %TEMP%*.* /f /s /q and save the file with the .bat exten­sion, after which this object can be run at any time to auto­mat­i­cal­ly free up space in the “%TEMP%” fold­er.

Browser cleaning

With con­stant use of the Inter­net, every time you go to a new page, all data about it is stored in the brows­er his­to­ry, which over time leads to severe clog­ging of the disk with unnec­es­sary files, some of which can be quite large in size. The same goes for appli­ca­tion data, down­loads, cook­ies and cache files, which need to be cleaned reg­u­lar­ly to pre­vent disk space from fill­ing up, which leads to a sharp drop in sys­tem per­for­mance. For this rea­son, we looked at the work of sev­er­al pop­u­lar browsers, in which the algo­rithms for clear­ing tem­po­rary files dif­fer slight­ly from each oth­er.

1. In Yan­dex Brows­er, the main menu is locat­ed at the top right of the dia­log box, where you need to click “His­to­ry” — “Clear His­to­ry” and mark the areas you need to clear.

2. “Google Chrome” has a sim­i­lar inter­face, but here you have to select “More tools” — “Delete brows­ing data” — “Delete data” or press “Ctrl + Shift + Del” at the same time.

3. To erase the his­to­ry from the Mozil­la brows­er, you need to go through the main menu, which is locat­ed sim­i­lar­ly to Google Chrome, go to the “His­to­ry” — “Delete Now” tabs.

In alter­na­tive Inter­net browsers, all actions for delet­ing tem­po­rary files are per­formed in approx­i­mate­ly the same way.

Disabling hibernation

Deac­ti­vat­ing hiber­na­tion is also a good method of free­ing up disk space, since the files con­tained in this area are tem­po­rary, and they are used to store the sys­tem state on the hard dri­ve in order to pro­tect data in the event of a pow­er out­age, for exam­ple, when a lap­top is dis­charged. As a result, if the com­put­er is sta­tion­ary, and even more so con­nect­ed to a UPS, this option can be dis­abled by call­ing the com­mand line using “Win + R” — “cmd” by run­ning the “pow­er­cfg / h off” com­mand.

Use of Third Party Software

Now there are many pro­grams for clean­ing tem­po­rary files and con­fig­ur­ing oth­er areas of the sys­tem, so in this mate­r­i­al we will con­sid­er only the most famous util­i­ties.

1. “CClean­er” is one of the most pop­u­lar com­put­er clean­ing appli­ca­tions due to its var­i­ous func­tions and ease of use, for which you just need to down­load the pro­gram from the offi­cial web­site -
   https://www.ccleaner.comand after instal­la­tion in the right menu “Clean­ing” click on the but­ton of the same name.

2. “Adbanced Sys­tem Care” is a more advanced pro­gram with many dif­fer­ent fea­tures, includ­ing an antivirus mod­ule and a reg­istry edi­tor, but for ordi­nary users it will be enough to down­load the dis­tri­b­u­tion from the devel­op­er’s resource
   https://ru.iobit.comafter instal­la­tion of which auto­mat­ic scan­ning of clogged areas of the sys­tem will begin, after which it remains to click “Fix”.

3. The util­i­ty from the well-known devel­op­er of anti-virus soft­ware “Kasper­sky Clean­er” does not have any set­tings at all, but after using it, the test com­put­er began to work notice­ably faster, and all tem­po­rary files were delet­ed, there­fore, our experts con­sid­er this appli­ca­tion the best choice for novice users.

Thank you for your atten­tion, we hope the infor­ma­tion from our mate­r­i­al helped you!