Where are "temporary files" cleaned by Windows 7 Disk Cleanup?
The "Temporary Files" folder that Disk Cleanup is referring to is the one pointed to by the environment variable %TEMP%
. You can go directly to this folder by typing %TEMP%
in the Run box or in the address bar in Windows Explorer.
Disk Cleanup's list of "places to cleanup" is stored in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches
. The Temporary Files item is in a key named, unsurprisingly, Temporary Files
.
I couldn't find anything other than %TEMP%
in the registry key mentioned by Patrick, so I tried to log cleanmgr.exe
using Process Monitor.
cleanmgr.exe
does a File System
Class SetDispositionInformationFile
Operation with Delete: True
Detail on files in %TEMP%
, which in my case according to echo
is equal to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp
It had already deleted the 3 GB unaccounted for by %TEMP%
though, and didn't trim the 500+ MB C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log
; I suspect most of my wasted space was in winsxs
.