Why Cleaning Up After Windows Can Make Your Slow Computer Faster

So your computer’s slow and you have no clue where to start to make it faster? Try cleaning up your Temp folder. Your computer’s operating system is designed to run as quickly as possible but after time it will start to slow down (don’t worry this is natural). Why does this happen? See when your first get your computer it is completely “clean”. Then after you have used it for a while what happens is that it will start to slow down since it starts to accumulate “junk” in different areas of the computers operating system.

All you really have to do is to just go in there and clean up all of that junk – yes it’s that simple (well for the most part, you do also have to know how to tune your computer but that’s more in depth and beyond this article). This is why the idea of registry cleaners is so attractive – it cleans one area of your computer (your registry) to make it faster – but the big problem with registry cleaners is that they only clean one area while there are many different areas that need to be worked on to make your computer faster.

Your computer uses it’s RAM as a temporary working place. When some of these files are in RAM they also need a temporary working place of their own and they will use a folder on your hard drive called the temporary folder (or a Temp folder for short). When window’s is done working with these files in your temp folder it deletes them and everything is fine and dandy. The problem arises when you kill a program or when it freezes or hangs. What happens to the files in that folder is that they were never actually removed and after a while of this happening your Temp folder can build up a lot of files that are just slowing your computer down. Here’s a simple procedure to remove 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 using Windows Vista, close all running programs and files and click Start, type Run in the start menu search box. When the Run window comes up type %Temp% and hit enter. Now delete everything that you see in that folder. If there are some files that you cannot delete, 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.