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Disk and Temporary Files Cleanup

Over time, an operating system can generate a lot temporary files that become scattered around a user's hard drive. Both OS X and Windows XP offer different methods of deleting old and temporary files on a user's boot volume.

Mac OS X:

OS X relies on nightly, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts scheduled via cron to clean up temporary files. These scripts are set to run early in the morning around 3AM. There is no easy to change this time without editing specific files from the command line.

Users can manually run these scripts from the command line by typing:

sudo periodic daily

sudo periodic weekly

sudo periodic monthly

Using the command line to run these commands is an unfriendly solution for the average user.

Windows XP:

XP's Disk Cleanup is a handy utility that makes eliminating old and temporary files scattered around on your hard drive easy. To launch Disk Cleanup:

  1. Double-click My Computer

  2. Launch the Microsoft Management Console by right-clicking on My Computer and choosing "Manage"

  3. From the list of drives that appear, right-click the drive you are booting from (most often the C: drive) and choose "Properties"

  4. Click the button labeled 'Disk Cleanup' next to the pie chart displaying used/unused disk space

maintenance_cleanup_xp.gif
XP's Disk Cleanup utility

Disk Cleanup offers a list of available items you can delete from your system as well as the amount of disk space they are consuming. It also allows users to compress old files to save disk space.

XP users can use XP's Scheduled Task Wizard to automatically launch Disk Cleanup at a scheduled time and cleanup the contents of a drive of your choice. The Microsoft article Maintaining Your Windows XP-based PC explains how to do this in more detail.

Conclusion

OS X:

  • Automatic deleting of temporary files via scripts that are run on a daily, weekly, monthly basis
  • No easy way to customize when maintenance scrips are automatically run other than via the command line
  • No flexible options for customizing which items are deleted

XP:

  • Can customize which temporary or old files you want deleted
  • Can compress old files to save disk space
  • Can automatically schedule Disk Cleanup to delete old or temporary

Mac OS X: 4
Windows XP: 8