Your computer operating system uses RAM as a temporary working area for files and programs but sometimes those files that are being used in RAM are going to also need a temporary working area. This new temporary working area is a folder on your hard drive called the Temp folder. When your files in your RAM are done using the Temp folder Windows will automatically delete everything in that folder. The issue happens when your computer freezes, hangs or you end a program. All of the files that were in the Temp folder are still in there and they haven’t been deleted. This may not sound like much but after time these files can add up to a lot and start to slow your computer down. Here is how you get rid of them:
If you are running Windows XP on your computer just close all the running files and programs and then click on Start, click on Run and then type %Temp% in the little box and then hit the enter key. Now you’re going to get another small window that will now show you what is in your Temp folder. All you have to do now is to just delete everything that you possibly can in that folder. If for some odd reason it says that you cannot delete a certain file, just skip it and move onto the next one.
For those of you that are currently using Windows Vista, close all of your running programs and files, click Start in the left hand corner of your screen and type Run in the start menu search box. A small Run window should comes up now. Just type %Temp% and hit enter. Now what you are going to want to do is to delete everything that you see in that folder. If there are some files that you cannot delete that are in that folder, then just ignore them and move onto the next one.
For the most part, this will free up some hard drive space which will make your computer run faster (your hard drive will have less files to take care of) and your computer will have less internal errors which is always a plus.