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General discussion

Deleting clutter.

by nsns Nov 27, 2004 3:35AM PST

I have XP, and I want to free up some HD space and speed up my Virus scans. I delete a lot of files in my Local Settings folder for my account such as Temporary, Temporary Internet Files, History, etc. Anyway, as far as I know, these are safe to delete. Anyway, there are many users on this computer and it's annoying to have to go into each folder for each user to delete everything. Is there any easy way to delete all these files in say one easy click.

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3 Posts
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Re: Deleting clutter.
by Steven Haninger Nov 27, 2004 4:12AM PST

I don't think XP will let you do this and have not seen third party utilites that will either. You might be able to delete a lot of stuff MS updates leave on the drive such as are found in the Windows folder. These tend to have identifying names. Another alternative would be to use a second drive as storage. You can move the My Documents folder for each user to the other drive and keep the primary drive a lot cleaner. Hope that helps.

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Re: Deleting clutter.
by MarkFlax Former Forum moderator Nov 27, 2004 4:22AM PST

If you can't get a 2nd drive, perhaps the best way is to set aside an hour or so each week for you to get the housekeeping done. You can run Disk Cleanup, which can be found in the Start Menu, ie Start > Programs, (or Program Files), > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup, and this will do every task you do, temp files, temporary Internet files, Recycle Bin, in one go.

Whether Disk Cleanup in your Administrator account will cleanup these files in the other accounts I am not sure. You could try it and see.

I'm not sure from your post whether the other users have Admin access themselves, or just user access. If they all have admin access, could you consider limiting their access to User only, and limiting what they can do on the computer, eg, not install any programs without Admin permission?

With a lot of users, it would be well to set aside some time to defrag the hard disk more regularly as well, unless they all have limited access mentioned above.

Mark

Mark

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Re: Deleting clutter.
by westerntony Nov 27, 2004 7:49AM PST

Just a suggestion, go to majorgeek.com/downloads - Home/Drive cleaners. Some that I have used for years with no problems are:
1-Find Junk Files/Broken Shortcuts (includes empty files also - be carefull with this section)
2-Dustbuster
3-Find Unused Files (try 1 year, then 6 months)
Start with these & see what happens, there are a lot of free tools here.

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