Where are "temporary files" cleaned by Windows 7 Disk Cleanup?

Question

My disk cleanup seems unable to delete a lot of messages worth of "temporary files" that it sees, even after I went and deleted contents of various temporary folders I found myself. I would like to try delete such files manually, but for this I need to figure out just where are those "temporary files" that Disk Cleanup is detecting and offering to delete.

Any suggestions? What folders does Disk Cleanup examine to tally up the temporary files?

Answer 1

The "Temporary Files" folder that Disk Cleanup is referring to is the one pointed to by the environment variable %TEMP%. You can go directly to this folder by typing %TEMP% in the Run box or in the address bar in Windows Explorer.

Disk Cleanup's list of "places to cleanup" is stored in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches. The Temporary Files item is in a key named, unsurprisingly, Temporary Files.

Answer 2

I couldn't find anything other than %TEMP% in the registry key mentioned by Patrick, so I tried to log cleanmgr.exe using Process Monitor.

cleanmgr.exe does a File System Class SetDispositionInformationFile Operation with Delete: True Detail on files in %TEMP%, which in my case according to echo is equal to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp

It had already deleted the 3 GB unaccounted for by %TEMP% though, and didn't trim the 500+ MB C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log; I suspect most of my wasted space was in winsxs.

Answer 3

It's very simple to remove all temporary files on Windows 7 64bit or 32-bit. Just do the below:

1. Open (RUN), type %temp%, and then Enter.
2. You will find that all temporary files are in that folder. Just remove what you want.

See http://www.get-answer.net/questions/how-to-remove-the-temp-files-in-windows-7-64x/.