Ever noticed your computer acting sluggish or warning you about low storage? Temporary files could be the sneaky culprit. Windows creates these files while installing apps, loading web pages, or running updates. Left unchecked, they pile up and hog valuable space. Luckily, clearing them out is easier than cleaning your kitchen junk drawer. Let’s explore Storage Sense, Disk Cleanup, manual deletion, and a few bonus performance tips to keep your PC running like new.
↫ Microsoft Windows Learning Center
You may think this is one of those junk SEO articles generated by “AI” to trap Google searches, but no, this is published by Microsoft on Microsoft’s website. Instead of fixing the long-standing and well-known problems around Windows being absolutely terrible at keeping itself clean and functional over longer periods of time, the company figured it’d be a better idea to just keep shoving that responsibility unto users instead.
None of the tools mentioned in this article should need to be run or set up by users manually. A computer is supposed to make life less tedious, not more so, and I already have enough cleaning up and laundry to do out here in the real world, and I don’t want to be bothered with it on my computer. Why on earth am I supposed to manually remove unnecessary Windows Update files? Why did Adobe installers leave about 15GB of old installers in some directory inside C:/Windows on my wife’s computer that I had to remove using a third party tool? In what universe is this okay?
Sometimes I wonder how much of our collective time is wasted just by dealing with Windows on a day-to-day basis in our society. Imagine the time we could reclaim and spend on our loved ones, families, and hobbies instead, if only Windows was developed by people with even a modicum of competency.
Desktop Linux isn’t better: I am willing to give Linux credit for cleaning up /tmp upon boot, but that’s where the praise ends. Otherwise, Desktop Linux is basically Windows if not worse: Logfiles filling up the disk (a problem Systemd partially addresses via log rotation, but only for apps that use standard logging), package managers leaving temporary files everywhere, thumbnails filling up your home directory (and making you hit your home directory quota if in a university/corporate setting), and /var being a dumping ground with no contractual obligation for when the files should be cleaned up. Oh, and old kernels left on the disk, an issue Windows doesn’t have.
It’s as if no OS vendor cares about the issue, because they assume you’ll re-install the OS every 3 years or so anyway and because they assume disk is plentiful in all occasions (which fails in situations where a home directory quota exists or in VMs/EC2 instances with small virtual disk space).
Every OS is shit, just often in slightly different ways. I don’t understand OS fanboyism when there isn’t an OS in existence that isn’t flawed in some significant way.
The123king,
Every software project starts in a clean state, and collects “cruft” over time. This is true for operating systems as well.
And this becomes the repeating norm.
(C# for example started as a “fix” for Java’s mistakes. It was a much cleaner and better design. Impressive even that day. Today it also has its own many quirks, like having generics arrive too late in the design)
There’s no cloud. There’s just someone else’s computer.
Why is there allways leftovers when “disk cleanup” finishes one have to manually cleanup folders, not that many users that know this.
True, that Linux has now caught up Windows in the ability of constant creating of tmp stuff and not cleaning it. And the arrival of flatpak and snap has made it even worse.
BleachBit is of help both in Linux and Windows.