Another computer problem

Factual Questions
1

Following up on a previous thread about my stupid computer not booting, I finally fixed it by running CHKDSK. That ran for 23 hours, but when done, my desktop was back. I then did a restore from Retrospect and everything seemed OK.

When I then decided to do another full backup after tweaking it, I took a very long time, and I noticed it was spending a great deal of time backing up a bunch of strange looking .tmp files.

When it was done, I went to Windows/Temp and there were, hold your hat, about 205,000 files. Must be everything CHKDSK did to fix things, but that is astounding to me.

Anyway, I wanted to delete them, but when I selected them all, and hit delete, it did not do anything. I unselected them all, and tried deleting a screenful at a time, but it was slow, and deleting about 12 files at a time would take days to get red of all 205K.

I tried this a few times more, using Win Explorer and a better program, but had the same problem with both.

I also have a program called Easy Clean that gets rid of all .tmp files, but when it got to the Win/temp folder, it just hung up.

The problem is when I do a backup or run a couple of antispyware programs, it takes forever to scan through all these damned files.

Anybody know of a better way to get rid of them?

2

A program called CCleaner should be able to do the trick for you.

3

Ah, bless you, my man (woman?), that did the trick. It took quite a while, but surely not as long as deleting them manually.

Would you believe the results showed 206,899 files deleted from that folder, along with some .tmp files from other places?

Funny thing, I used to have CCleaner, but forgot to install it on my new computer.:smack:

What a relief to have a nice empty Temp folder. Well, one .dat file is there, but I can live iwth that.

Thanks again.

4

Note that those, or some of those, files you deleted are almost certainly fragments of valid files. You’ll probably find data files that are incomplete or can’t be opened. If any are parts of applications or Windows files, things start to be a bit more serious. I would have suggested you open up a few in Notepad just to see what kind of thing they were.

As it stands I would do a full system backup immediately, NOT overwriting any previous backups you might have. Then I’d plan a complete reinstall of Windows, apps, and data.