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?
Solution:
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_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerVolumeCaches. The Temporary Files item is in a key named, unsurprisingly, Temporary Files.
