Last week, I showed how to clean out your Windows Temp folder properly.
Today’s tip is a follow-up to that item, showing how you can schedule some routine maintenance chores to be performed automatically.
The secret is buried in the Scheduled Tasks folder, which you can find in Control Panel. (It’s in the Performance and Maintenance group, if you use the Category view of Control Panel.)
Open the Scheduled Tasks folder and double-click Add Scheduled Task. This launches the Scheduled Task Wizard, which walks you through the process of creating a new task. After you get past the opening screen, you’ll see a list of available programs on your PC. Select the Disk Cleanup entry and click Next.
Enter a name for the task (the default should work just fine in this case) and specify how often you want the task to run – daily, weekly, etc. The next secreen in the wizard varies, depending on the option you choose. This screen, for instance, shows a task that has been scheduled to run once a week – at 2:30 AM every Monday.
In the next screen, enter the user name and password of the account whose credentials you want the task to use. This data (which is saved in encrypted format) allows a scheduled task to run even if you’re not logged on. It also allows a task that requires administrative privileges to run when a user with a limited account is logged on.
Finish the wizard to save the scheduled task.
Follow-up: I’ve put together instructions to help you customize the Disk Cleanup task so it performs only the options you want it to run.
Ed Bott 
Thanks for resuming this great feature. In tomorrow’s tip, can you include how to schedule Disk Cleanup to clean automatically a particular volume on a multi-partition hard drive? TIA.
Ken
Do you have to have a password? I don’t use passwords to access user accounts, so was wondering if this is a password just for this particular operation or if it’s a password, I’m going to need to enter every time I try to log onto my computer?
Thanks,
Mark
It is now tomorrow and time to show how to customize Disk Clenaup!! Did you forget that we really read and sometimes use your advice?
I’ve been trying to config schedule task to run at least twice a day but it doesn’t seems to be able to fire up. The config interface is quite different if it’s more than once per day?