Am using DELL Inspiron with Windows 7.
As far as I know emptying the windows temp folder would be good. But I faced a strange behaviour around 8 months back, when I clear my windows temp folder. The next day onwards, my laptop starting displaying daily one or other errors and one day OS got crashed. Till now I am not sure whether OS got crashed due to clearing the windows temp folder or something else is problem.
Here Windows temp folder mean "C:\Windows\Temp"
This is the behind the story.
Today, this temp folder "C:\Windows\Temp" contains 102 GB.
Most of the space occupied by the files starts with etilqs_*.*. I came to know that these files are generated due to WD SmartWare.
Now my problem is:-
Actually I want clean up this folder, since it occupies lot of space.
If I clean up "C:\Windows\Temp" folder, will my laptop face the same kind of problem which I faced earlier OR Any new problems will occur?
Please suggest me a good solution.
Best Answer
As the name implies, the location is intended for files that are only supposed to be stored temporarily.
So, if you write an application and you want to store something for later retrieval, this is the wrong place for you. The Temp location is only to be used for data that, if gone, wouldn't matter anyway.
Sadly, not every programmer understands that concept.
If someone decided to place a critical file in that location, deleting that file might cause a problem to an application.
So, in my personal opinion, deleting the contents of the Temp folder shouldn't cause any problems. But due to the fact of how it is used, it can not be guaranteed to be a safe operation.
Please also keep in mind, emptying the folder while the system in operational could cause a running application to lose a file it placed there. Emptying the folder is something best done during boot.