Delete Temp Files And Free Up Lots Of Hard Drive Space. Learn How To Do It Here.

Delete Temp Files On Your PC To Free Up Large Amounts Of Disk Space

When you delete temp files on your PC you can free up quite a lot of disk space which will help to speed up your computer, especially if your hard drive is almost full.

Temp files (tmp files) are files that are created by programs installed on your PC as these programs are running. They contain temporary information which the software uses as it runs. These files are not crucial and can be deleted.

Most temporary files have the extension (the file suffix) .tmp. However there are some temp files with different suffixes such as .xar, .loc and .chk. Some temporary files are preceded by the squiggly line "~" (which is one of the hardest keys to find on the keyboard).

Software is supposed to store the temporary files in the temp files folder, which is otherwise known as the Windows temp folder. Alot of the time this doesn't actually happen and they get stored willy nilly throughout your computer.

I am going to teach you a method to find all of the temporary files that are residing on your computer so that you can delete temp files, free up lots of disk space and speed up your slow computer.

How To Find Temp Files

Temporary files can be found using the find or search feature of Microsoft Windows. First click on "Start" and choose "Search" (on Windows XP) or "Find" then "Files and Folders" (on other operating systems. The following window will appear :

Make sure that you click on the "All Files and Folders" Button so that the following window appears and then in the "Type of file" drop down menu select the C: drive, or whatever other drives contain your programs and operating system. Note that you can include more than one drive here.

search all files and folders

Click on "More Advanced Options" and make sure that the "Search System folders", "Search hidden files and folders" and "Search subfolders" check boxes are all checked as in the following picture :

search more advanced options

Finally in the text box "All or part of a file name:" copy and paste the following : *.tmp,*.chk,~*.* then click on the search button. You will need to wait while the search feature looks for and lists all of the temporary files it can find on your hard drive or hard drives. The result will look something like the following :

search results

By clicking on the Size column header at the top of the search results box you can sort the temporary files by file size. This lets you see how big some of the temp files are. Most of the tmp files are quite small but as you can see I found over 500 of them and they add up to over 100 megabytes.

Delete Temp Files

Now that you have found all of the temporary files on your computer it is time to delete temp files. Click on one of the temporary files and then press the CTRL and A key at the same time. All of the files you found have now been selected. Press the delete key and they will be transferred to your recycle bin.

If you are nervous about deleting all of these tmp files all at once, then I suggest you leave them in the recycle bin for a while. That way you will be able to restore them to their original location in the event that your computer starts to play up after they have been deleted.

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