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.

In the comments to a post entitled Everything you always wanted to know about Windows Product Activation, Tim asks:

How do you tell if a product has an OEM vs Retail install? … I have some integrated computers I am responsible for and when I call tech support, they sometimes ask which version of XP/2000 I am running, OEM or Retail.  I got thrown into this and the last guy didn’t keep up with things very well…any help is appreciated!

It’s easy to tell once you know where to look. Right-click the My Computer icon and choose Properties. (You can reach the same destination by starting in Control Panel and double-clicking System.) On the General tab of the System Properties dialog box, under the “Registered to” heading, you’ll see a product ID, which is divided into four groups of characters separated by hyphens. On an OEM installation, the second group of characters is always OEM; on a retail installation, you’ll see three numbers in this group.

That might be your only OEM fingerprint on a computer built in-house or by a “white box” system maker. But for systems from larger PC makers, including the so-called royalty OEMs, you should also see a product logo and the words “Manufactured and supported by” followed by the name of the company that built the PC. Here’s an example:

One other piece of advice: If you’ve inherited a group of computers and don’t have a handy index to identify the product ID required to reactivate each one, use the wonderful Keyfinder utility to dig out Windows and Office keys, which you can copy to a database or print out and save for future reference. I first wrote about Keyfinder back in December 2002, and it’s still one of my most popular pages.

Excel whiz John Walkenbach inspired today’s tip with this post:

I haven’t looked at my Windows \temp directory in a long time. I used to be pretty good about keeping it cleaned out, but I’ve ignored it lately. I just looked at it and found that it contains

• 4,272 files
• 95 folders
• 721Mb

Yikes! Shouldn’t this stuff should be deleted by the apps that placed them there?

Well, yes and no. I just checked this system and discovered 95MB of disk space in use by 496 files and 103 folders, most of them empty. The entire collection dates back about 60 days, which must be the last time I cleaned out temp files.

Some of those files were ones I created or downloaded. (Putting them in the Temp folder is the best way of dealing with files you are positive you won’t want to keep.) When I play a media file directly from a browser or view a Word document or PDF page in the browser window, the downloaded WMV or DOC or PDF file is saved in my Temp folder. Microsoft Office creates a bunch of temp files as it works to keep track of changes and enable its automatic recovery features. I don’t bother deleting these files manually after I’m done, and I don’t expect any program to aggressively clean them up either. The whole idea of the Temp folder is to serve as a junk drawer for files, and any program that puts a file there should assume it’ll get tossed out with the trash sooner rather than later when I empty the Temp folder.

Here are three ways to do just that:

• The hard way: delete files manually using Windows Explorer. As J-Walk discovered, Explorer quits abruptly as soon as you encounter a file that’s in use – and at least on my computer the Temp folder is usually filled with a dozen or more files in use. To avoid hitting one of those files, display the folder’s contents in Details view and then sort by date. That way you can delete files in groups. Select the oldest files and delete them, then select a newer group of files and delete those, until you get to a group that includes some files in use. At that point you can stop. You’ve probably cleaned out all that you can do.
• The easier way: Use the Disk Cleanup Wizard. Click Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup. Pick a drive, click OK, and wait for the quick analysis. Click OK again, and you’ll empty the Recycle Bin, clear out Internet Explorer’s cache, and empty all files from the Temp folder that are more than a week old.



• The really easy way: Create a Scheduled Task to have your system clean out your Temp folder and perform other cleanup chores automatically. If you poke around in the Scheduled Tasks folder, you’ll see that this option is available with a wizard’s help.

To learn how you can schedule this bit of routine maintenance to run once a week (or on any schedule you prefer), see this tip.