26+ GB temp files

[tcsenter]

I'm doing some maintenance on a friend's HP Media Center tower with Vista Home Premium SP1. Figured that I'd check the Windows/Temp folder to see if there was excess temp file clutter in there. And I guess you could say I found some excess temp file clutter:

64862 files

Size: 26.6 GB

Nearly all some sort of tmp.vdf files from an HP application or utility (e.g. HPVA6A4.tmp.vdf), all the .tmp.vdf files are the same size - 431KB. This breaks the previous record that I've seen by about 20GB. Windows Explorer hangs after I click "select all" so that I can delete the bastards.

:roll:

 

[ImDonly1]

I had this too on Windows 7. Except mine was much smaller about 5 GB. The system cleanup doesn't even pick it up. You have to manually remove it.

I don't have an HP computer but had a lot of .vdf files.

 

[tcsenter]

Sixty four thousand....

I've done nothing for the past 35 minutes but delete them in groups of about 7000 (~ 3GB). Still have 24,000 to go.

 

[bloodugly]

Wow, based off of these posts, this seems like something Microsoft should look into.

 

[Nothinman]

Yea, sadly Windows still doesn't have something like tmpreaper that cleans out temp directories of files that haven't been touched in some period of time.

 

[seemingly random]

You could open a command prompt and issue 'del *.vdf'

 

[tcsenter]

Done! And found another ~3GB worth of temp files located in the user profile temp directory (e.g. C:\Users\{userprofilename}\AppData\Local\Temp).

Now to do chkdsk /f. I'm betting there is lots of free space marked as allocated. Frigging ridiculous.

 

[tcsenter]

I don't know what was going on, but this machine just got hugely more responsive after deleting that crap. The machines specs aren't bad at all:

Pavilion M8020n Specs

The system was crawling in almost every task; desktop loading, browsing the HDD via Windows Explorer, application launch. Now its noticeably faster.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

odd. i have a dell and i only found about 4 MB temp files in the windows folder. only had about 30MB in the appdata folder as well.
i'm running W7 Ent.

 

[Bill Kunert]

I had a problem with Vista building up files in the windows/temp folder but never have more than 6 in Win7 temp folder. I had some friends whose computers had slowed to a crawl and I installed Iobit's free Advanced System Care. It took a long time to run the first scan Their computers speeded up considerably after using it. I use it with Win7 and scan at least once a week. It, however, will not clean out the windows/temp folder.

 

[tcsenter]

This wasn't a case of accumulated temp files over time. One of HP's printer suites serially wrote all these temp files due to some bug or glitch in the installer. All the files are the same size and have the same "last modified" date and time down to the second. I opened a few of them in a text editor and they all appear to have the same content. The owner said it took over an hour for the HP printer suite to finish installing and now I see why.

 

[ImDonly1]

FYI, a google search turns up a technet article. The problems people describe say it comes from participating in "HP customer experience" thing. It asks if you want to sign up and help HP with stuff kinda thing. It builds up in there.

Also earlier I said the Windows disk cleaner doesn't clean out the TEMP folder. This is wrong. I noticed that when you right click the hard drive and click Properties. Click the disk cleanup. You have to click "clean system files."

 

[Crusty]

I've had this Vista install for 1.5yrs and I've never cleaned my Windows/Temp folder manually. I just checked and it's only using 135MB too.

26GB is just nuts. :Q

 

[lxskllr]

I've had mine since Sept 07, and I have 144KB of temp files :^D

I guess I must have cleaned it at some point, but I don't remember doing so.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: ImDonly1
FYI, a google search turns up a technet article. The problems people describe say it comes from participating in "HP customer experience" thing. It asks if you want to sign up and help HP with stuff kinda thing. It builds up in there.

Thanks for that, can you provide a link to the Technet article? I've searched but turned up nothing.

Also earlier I said the Windows disk cleaner doesn't clean out the TEMP folder. This is wrong. I noticed that when you right click the hard drive and click Properties. Click the disk cleanup. You have to click "clean system files."

But it won't clean out the Windows/Temp folder. It cleans out the user profile temp folder. At least, it didn't because I ran Disk Cleanup before I discovered them.

 

[heymrdj]

I use ATFCleaner for it, works well. http://download.cnet.com/ATF-C...000-18512_4-89432.html

 

[ImDonly1]

Originally posted by: tcsenter

Originally posted by: ImDonly1
FYI, a google search turns up a technet article. The problems people describe say it comes from participating in "HP customer experience" thing. It asks if you want to sign up and help HP with stuff kinda thing. It builds up in there.

Thanks for that, can you provide a link to the Technet article? I've searched but turned up nothing.

http://social.technet.microsof...451c-b216-cdab7933d1c3

I think people are discussing the problem on Vista, but Windows 7 is probably the same.

 

[theprodigalrebel]

26GB is insane but I've seen this happen a couple of times. Usually the very same scenario - installing something trivial takes forever, brings everything to a grinding halt, launches a dozen or so instances of msiexec.exe etc. Fun times. Firing up Process Explorer and looking at the I/O graph usually delivers the lulz.