IDEA: Clearing up Windows temp files

[curtisw2000]

So a long time ago (98 SE time frame) I had this interesting program that was nice but I cannot remember what it was called or anything...

So you know when your computer starts running slow b/c it's been a while since you restarted it or something.  Then you restart it and it works fine again.  Well this little program would do that without the restart.  Basically it would be an icon sitting down by the clock.  Then you'd right click it and it'd clear out all the files (or whatever) that Windows does when you restart...without the restart.  I'm not sure what it cleared or anything, but the computer would be running just as quick as if you restarted.  It wouldn't like restart any programs or anything, and it happened pretty much instantly.

Anyways, I think such a program would be quick to make and many people would find it useful....I know I would certainly appreciate it...

[f0dder]

It's easy enough to delete %TEMP%, but it's not going to fix any slowdown problems - those are caused by other issues, and shouldn't really be happening in NT versions of Windows (although sucky 3rd-party applications might have leaks or poor memory management, and thus could use a restart).

[curtisw2000]

I'm actually running XP now.  It really doesn't happen anymore unless my computer is on for >24 hours w/o restart.  But I found that the program would fix my computer anytime it started to bog down. 

I understand that this description is a little vague but that's all I knew about it.  It's probably far more complicated than I realize...

[f0dder]

I haven't seen Windows behave like this for years - and I've often run XP (and before that, Win2k) for several days without rebooting. But I guess you might have a combination of low RAM and some buggy software running... my advice would be checking process memory consumption (using a proper tool like Process Explorer) and check whether you've got any software with very high "private bytes" or "WS private" usage.

FireFox is one of the applications that need to be restarted periodically, even FF3 with it's much improved memory allocation and cleanup.

[Hello71]

It might actually be a combination of the above and Win9xSE's poor mem handling. Probably cleared the working set, etc. As to why XP works better, XP does a much better job of memory handling and garbage collection (especially with new automated garbage collection for beginning programmers) like automatically trimming the working set of programs when they minimize.

[f0dder]

Garbage collection is really a feature of .NET (and other programming platforms), not XP... and it isn't just a feature for "beginning programmers"