How To Delete Temporary Files With Ccleaner

To remove temporary files which have accumulated over time, use the free Ccleaner program. Temporary files are files stored by programs and Windows itself that are supposed to be temporary. Unfortunately they are often never deleted and accumulate over time.

We see computers with thousands of these ‘temporary’ files clogging up Windows and taking up Gigabytes of space on the hard drive. There are a couple of good reasons to remove them – although the space they use is not vital on large hard drives, temporary files can slow down Windows and other programs (because they have to load up thousands of these useless files every time they start).

Also, temporary files can be a privacy risk – they may store details of which websites you have visited or which files you have recently opened – if you share your computer then the other person might be able to track what you have been up to.

To remove ‘temporary’ files we will use the free Ccleaner software which has been updated to include cleaning of all the major web browsers as well as many other programs.

How To Use Ccleaner – Download the latest version of Ccleaner from Filehippo here and install it. During the installation it will ask if you want to ‘Intelligently Scan For Cookies To Keep’ – choose Yes (recommended) if you want to keep your persistent logins for Hotmail/Yahoo Mail etc from being deleted.

Once installed, open Ccleaner to display the main program window as shown below:

ccleaner1

All the items ticked will be cleaned – the options ticked above will be fine for most users but untick any of the History, Cookies and Recently Typed URLs (website names) if you want to keep them.

Tip: the next time you start Ccleaner it will remember which boxes were ticked from the last time you ran it.

Perform The Cleaning – First, close your web browser to ensure it can be cleaned then click on the Analyze button to begin scanning for temporary files – when the scan is complete the right hand panel will show a list of all the items to be cleaned and their approximate size in MB (this may take some time on a slower computer with a lot of temporary files).

If you do not want to delete a particular item, untick it on the left hand side and click the Analyze button to scan again. When you are happy to go ahead with cleaning all of the items shown, click on ‘Run Cleaner’ to delete these temporary files – this may take some time on a slower computer with a lot of temporary files.

Once cleaning has finished, close Ccleaner – your tracks and temporary files have now been erased :-)

Quicker Cleaning In Future

Once you have used Ccleaner a few times and are happy that the items you have ticked are correct, you can omit the Analyze step and just press ‘Run Cleaner’ to speed up the process.

4 thoughts on “How To Delete Temporary Files With Ccleaner”

  1. You have a very informative site here,and very helpful for a novice like me,thank you very much.
    My next and biggest problem is understanding half the jargon,and computor talk,but i will get there in the end,it’s a case of trial and error,thank’s again.

    • Thanks for the comments Brian, we try to keep articles (relatively) jargon free because everyone’s different – if an article is aimed at more advanced users we usually say so.

      The more you read and do, the less of a novice you will become – we all had to start somewhere :-)

  2. We are not affiliated in any way with Filehippo but we do this with many download links for 2 reasons:

    1. Filehippo often provides quicker downloads than the official site

    2. It is often easier to find the download link on Filehippo than on some official sites – particularly free antivirus software (I’m thinking of you AVG!) which can ‘bury’ the free version deep within the site. If we post a link to free software we don’t want people being misled into downloading a limited trial of the commercial software by mistake.

Comments are closed.