where do win/temp files come from

[sam moore]

I have 98se and am wondering how the files get to win/temp. I didn't put them there, and it's almost 900MB worth. Do you have to go through and selectly pick what to delete, or just select them all. I highlited an audio file and it was from an email I sent my daughter. Does it still remain in my sent messages, or will I loose it by deleteing it from the temp?
Thanks!

[EzyStvy]

Almost all programs write to the temp foder. They are "suppost" to delete the files when done. As you can see, many programs don't clean up agter themselves. As a "general" rule, it is safe to delete the files yourself.

[LawyerRon]

Normally you can delete all files in the WIN TEMP folder, unless you've unknowingly saved files to this folder. I've seen people do this in the past; they've saved Word docs and just about everything to the this folder for some reason. Otherwise, just be careful and look throught all the files. If it's nothing you've created, it can be deleted.

[Cricket]

Hi sam moore,

Wow, 900 megs...that's a lot of temp files wasting hard drive space.

Like mentioned above, the Temp folder is used by Windows programs as a sort of storage area for files that are use. The files are supposed to be deleted after the program is done with it...but as you can see, many times this isn't the case.

To regain all that space back, you can go in there and safely delete any file with the .tmp extension. I normally just delete everything, but since you have so much in there it might be a good idea to go through all the files to see if there's anything important that isn't saved somewhere else.

If you use Disk Cleanup, it's supposed to clean out the Windows\Temp folder for you...check to see that the Temporary files is selected. If you didn't know about this utility, it's located in Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools. I usually run this once a week.

After you've cleaned up the Temp folder, run Scandisk and Defrag. Defrag will probably take awhile since it's going to have to re-order most of the files in the c: partition.

Cricket