You have often heard it mentioned that computers need to be clean up to help it run better. I’m not absolutely sure if that is the absolute truth, but I have found on occasions that Malware files and other unneeded files pile up in certain areas that makes sense to clean up since there is no real need for them to exist anymore. For a computer that is already low on disk space, you can easily clean up several GB of space, which may be well worth it.
Internet Temporary Files
Internet Explorer temp filles are located in various places depending on your operating system, for example on a Windows 7 machine it should be located under:
C:\users\username\AppData\Local\Microsfot\Windows\Temporary Internet Files
Why do these temporary files exist related to web browsing? These files are downloaded when you browse the Internet so you can actual view your website. However these files are not purged after you are finished instead they are cached so that next time you go to the same website, the page will load up much faster since most of the files are already downloaded. You can see that the problem with this is years of browsing and your cache can really start to add up.
In fact I’ve seen certain website have trouble loading because of corrupted cache files and cleaning it up does clear up this issue, but for the most part you don’t have to be obsessive about removing these files. If you do want to force the issue and delete these files, you can go into your Internet options and hit the Delete on the Browsing history. There you can tell it to delete these files.
Install Temporary Files
These files pile up due to various installs you do on your computer. You’ll be surprised how many files pile up here, even though it seems as if you have done nothing with your computer. These files exist because they are a temporary location where files are unzipped and run from, once they wrap up – you guessed it – they don’t bother to clean themselves up.
How do you get to this location? Just put in %temp% after the run command from your menu. This will put you right in that folder, where you can proceed to delete everything.
There is also a temp folder under the Windows directory which is another cache you can completely clear off.