Help ! Huge tmp file

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Hi there

I have a problem I was at work and I have always had a weird feeling about our hard drive it had a 75gb drive according to the properties tab in explorer but nothing but basic office software was installed. Well I decided today to see what was eating up all my space.

It turns out in the windows temp file (C:\WINDOWS\Temp) there is a tmp file in there that is over 35gb! And a few more that is 10gb plus, what are these anyone know? Are they safe to delete ?

We are running windows xp pro running a AMD Athlon 1700 1.47 ghz 256mb ram.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Only thing I can think of is that an admin left them there and they might be drive images or an accumulation of automatically generated restore points of some kind.

In any case I dont see any reason for a file that large unless your computer is being used for database storage (unlikely) as a rule of thumb generally anything in the \windows\temp directory can be safely deleted.

Visit this site:
http://safety.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm?s_cid=sah

temp should get deleted at reboot

"temp should get deleted at reboot"

Not always. I have found many temp files on my comp from months ago, and several that refuse to be deleted. Plus, some temp files reappear every time the comp restarts (such as Warcraft III autorun/installer).


Delete whatever you can of them. It shouldn't affect much.

Thanks for all the replies. I know the temp files have been there for a while and I have used many different disk cleaners and they have yet to detect it. It's just odd after working with computers for 11 years; I was shocked to see that! I am just happy to find out what was eating up the space.

once I...

...once I opened a command prompt and wrote something like:

copy file1+file2+file3 file1
or something similar like file1+file1,
which resulted in a loop, and watched as my computer started to fill

temp files WON'T get deleted if the program that made it crashed, and didn't close properly, or if the entire operating system crashed, locked up, or if someone turned the computer off while Windows was still running. During normal operation, programs can generate TMP files while they are running. When they are closed, the TMP file that it was using will get deleted. Considering how flakey and crash-prone Windows is, most people find their computer loaded with tmp files. Luckily, they are usually rather small, especially on a more robust N.T. based operating system like win2000 or XP. In those, an errant program typically won't take out the entire O.S. with it when it screws up luckily, resulting in fewer, and smaller TMP files