Monday, July 10, 2006

purge your temp files

looking to clean up your virtual desk a bit? use this little app to remove temporary files from your machine.

when I ran it, I was amazed to discover that it deleted over 16,500 files - saving me almost 1.5GB of space on my drive.

it's called the Temp Scrubber. it was written by Greg Chapman and it's a macro embedded in a Word document template. after you download it, just extract it and double-click it. based on your macro security settings, you'll then see one of a few options. if you have the choice to 'enable macros' then do so - this will run the app. if you don't have this option, click cancel and then, from Word, choose Tools -> Options -> Macros -> Security and change your security level to medium. after you have changed your setting, you'll be able to run the macros. you can obviously change your setting back after you are done.

unfortunately, the macro is locked, so I can't examine the code directly. based on the output from the app, I'm guessing that it checks the directories designated as temp in the NT environmental settings and then deletes files from those directories that are not currently being used. for example, the app did not delete all of my temporary internet files.

note: it may take a while to run the first time and it's CPU intensive.

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