On my C drive, under Windows/temp I seem to have lots of folders containing lots of files. Many of them have charming, catchy names like “_istmp0.dir” (I seem to have about 10 of those.)
Some say it’s safe to just delete everything under ‘Temp’.
Some say leave the folders, just delete the files in them.
Some say delete the files, but only ones more than a few days old.
Some say this will help computer performance, others say it won’t make any difference.
Dopers, which of these should I believe? (Running Win 98SE on what was a moderately good-to-high spec PC as of 2001).
In principle there should only be junk files and directories there and all should be safe to delete when no programs are running. In practice, some stuff there might be needed for some purpose.
The safest thing to do is to move all the stuff to another location. E.g., a “temp2” directory. After running for a while and not noticing a problem, then delete that. If you get a message about unable to find a file or some such, look in temp2 for it and move it back. (But a real fix is needed to locate the reference to that file so you can put if someplace cozy and still have it be located.)
The main benefit of cleaning out the temp directory is to gain back the used disk space. As to speed: this might give you more room for your swap file if that is variable size and you are running out of disk space. But you really should make your swap file a fixed size and defrag it.