A DIY Cleanup

[The Shadow 2023]

Being tired of the So-Called Cleanup programs that "Don't", I decided to just write my own.
With a little experience doing that in XP, I've decided to get at it again in Win-11. If XP was a Pack Rat, then Win-11 is an absolute, serious, Hoarder! It never met a temp file it didn't want to keep.
During the development of my "Win11Cleanup.bat" program (batch file), it has removed over 300,000 junk files from this little Acer Slimline PC. It's normally on, from sunup to bedtime.
Today after being on-line all day, I ran my cleanup batch file, and at the end it reports how many files it's removed.
Here's that little report: This was after running for one or two days, at most.

I just hope this will serve as a Wake UP call, to those who never think about cleaning out the temp files and other junk from their PC's Hard Drives.
Cheers Mates!
The Shadow
PS: As a working PC tech, over the years, I've cleaned out Millions of junk files from my customer's PC's.
After a while they can, and do, seriously impact PC performance.

 

[RogerOver]

Does it help to not being spied upon by Microsoft (and the backdoors, intentionnaly left open to allow acces for the Government) and other States (from Russia over China to Israel) ?

Nope !

So where is the sense / advantage of cleaning that out ?

 

[The Shadow 2023]

Oh, by all means, you shouldn't, but I will, and I know a lot of other people who are also very concerned about the junk that's building up daily on their PC's. (Sometimes, thousands of junk files per day )
Sir, your approach is very negative. How is that helping anyone?

My first Cleanup batch file was written years ago, for Windows XP. It worked a treat to keep my HD clean, lean and running GRRRRREAT!
I shared that with my customers at the time, and they loved it.
Recently I've been revamping that old program to clean up Windows 11. With that pretty much finalized, with some HELP from other forum members, I've concentrated on revamping it for Windows 10, and now since I have 12 laptops that need a good cleaning, I'm working on revamping my little Cleanup batch file for use on Windows 8.1 PC's. That's going well. It's definitely time for some good Spring Cleaning!

Y'all have a great day now, Y'hear?
Shadow

 

[Ian]

Very interesting - would be interested to know what you scan for in your cleanup tool! Temp files, etc?

 

[The Shadow 2023]

Well, that's a good question.
There's always the obvious, .tmp files, .bak files, .old files and files in folders named \Temp\.
Then there's the not so obvious files created by Firefox, for instance, that reflects everything that FF sees. It records every page seen, and each page might contain hundreds of parts, and every part is recorded by FF, as one more file.
I can be on FF for just ten minutes, searching, browsing, what ever you want to call it, and FF will generate maybe a thousand files.
I now clean my PC's SSD every day and it's not unusual for my little batch file to remove: (thousands of junk files per day)

So, can you even imagine the mess I get in to, when I go in to clean up a PC several years old, that's never had any maintenance at all.
Some will hardly even run.
I use Edge only occasionally, but every time I run my program, there will be a bunch of temp files removed from Edge too. Seems like they just come out of nowhere.

I've been cleaning out and tuning up computers for 40+ years. Personal computers, Business Computers, and even a County Main Frame. So it's not just something I thought about recently.
It's just that now I'm retired and broke, and spend a lot of time at home, so I've got plenty of time to do what I'm doing now, to at least try to educate a small portion of PC operators of how they can improve the performance of their PC's, by doing regular Junk Removal.
I have nothing for sale, lease or rent! All my little tips and tricks are free to anyone wanting them.
And I really want to thank those who have supplied me with lines of code that I cannot create for myself.
It's really been a Group Effort.

 

[Ian]

Very nice! Surprising how many junk files accumulate over such a short period of time.

 

[The Shadow 2023]

And, the average PC user has no clue. When the little PC finally grinds down to a halt or near halt, and they take it to a repair shop, I really doubt that the PC Repair Tech explains it to them. It's more like, "Ok, it's all fixed, that'll be $125 please." And all they did was clean out the junk, and maybe blow the dust bunnies out of the cooling fan(s).

One dear sweet old lady called me one day, because her computer was not working, and a neighbor suggested that she call me.
Well, her WD hard drive had crashed. When I told her, she said she had just had that installed down at the local Computer shop, just a few months prior. Well I looked at the date on the drive and it was actually five years old. She was furious! So typical.

Y'all have a great day now, Y'hear?
Shadow

 

[The Shadow 2023]

As the old Western song said, "I'm Back in the saddle again!"

I have a very old eMachine, with an IDE hard drive in it, and it's running Windows XP.
Does anyone here remember that one? (no replies required)

Well, today I fired it up for the first time in a while, and started to re-work my very old "XPCleanup.bat" program that I wrote years ago.
Actually, I pushed that one aside, and started reworking my "Win11Cleanup.bat" program, to fit Windows XP.
All the path statements had to be re-written, for things like the Firefox Temporary Internet Files.
There was no Edge in XP, so that line got deleted.
The line to empty the recycle bid didn't work, so that one bit the dust too.

Finally, on the first test run, when it came to cleaning out the Firefox Cache, the files being deleted scrolled off the top of the screen for several minutes. As I mentioned somewhere, recently, Firefox numbers its temp files sequentially, in Hexadecimal. When I converted the Hex number of the last file, to Decimal, it came out to 65,529 (Temporary Internet Files) That's a BUNCH!
I have to remind myself, that every web page that Firefox ever saw, on this PC, was made up of several to many individual items, and every one is saved as a separate file. So the number of Cache files builds up really fast.
Well, they're GONE now thanks to the New and Improved "XPCleanup.bat" program (DOS Batch File)

I hear that some folks up North are still fighting with ICE and SNOW, but today it's sunny and 86 degrees F, here in Central FL.

Y'all come on down!

 

[The Shadow 2023]

Well, it's been a while, since I started working on my Cleanup11.bat batch file. I'm still tweaking and tuning it for Perfection. And, it just keeps getting Betterer and Betterer!
After not running my program for a couple of days, I ran it and got this final report:


With the windows still open on my desktop, I scrolled back up through all the files that had been deleted.
I was surprised to find that I had forgotten three basic lines of code at the very first of the batch file.

Here are those three simple lines of code:

Del /F /S /Q C:\*.tmp
Del /F /S /Q C:\*.bac
Del /F /S /Q C:\*/old

And after entering those three lines into my program (batch file) I ran the program again, and got this
report.


WOW! 3,517 junk files removed from just those three little lines of code.

Surely, there is someone out there who is interested in cleaning up their own computer. Eh?

 

[Bighorn]

I was going to try it but think there's an error in the last of the 3 lines:

Here are those three simple lines of code:

Del /F /S /Q C:\*.tmp
Del /F /S /Q C:\*.bac
Del /F /S /Q C:\*/old

And after entering those three lines into my program (batch file) I ran the program again, and got this
report.

 

[davehc]

Well, it's been a while, since I started working on my Cleanup11.bat batch file. I'm still tweaking and tuning it for Perfection. And, it just keeps getting Betterer and Betterer!
After not running my program for a couple of days, I ran it and got this final report:

View attachment 920
With the windows still open on my desktop, I scrolled back up through all the files that had been deleted.
I was surprised to find that I had forgotten three basic lines of code at the very first of the batch file.

Here are those three simple lines of code:

Del /F /S /Q C:\*.tmp
Del /F /S /Q C:\*.bac
Del /F /S /Q C:\*/old

And after entering those three lines into my program (batch file) I ran the program again, and got this
report.

View attachment 921
WOW! 3,517 junk files removed from just those three little lines of code.

Surely, there is someone out there who is interested in cleaning up their own computer. Eh?

I think the problem is that most are satisfied with the cleaning facilities built in, or, if they have further wishes, one of the more trustworthy proprietry offers - Ccleaner for example.
If a user has ample space, and no visible signs of the OS slowing down, they are satisfied.