.TMP Files

[The BeefMeister]

Ok .TMP files,

What are they?

What do they do?

And are they essential?
____________________
"Put your hands up motherstickers, this is a f*ck up!"

[MarJay]

They are temporary files used by windows as a kind of virtual memory. I have a feeling that newer windows OS's don't use them as much now because thy use a thing called a swap file instead (afaik).

They simply hold little bits and pieces of data that the OS doesn't want to trouble the RAM with because they don't need to be accessed that quickly.

On old windows OS's it used to be that you could just delete them all with no ill effects, and I imagine that it is the same on XP/2000/ME, but I wouldn't swear to it.

HTH
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British beauty: Triumph Street Triple R; Loony stroker: KR1S; Track fun: GSXR750 L1; Commuter Missile: GSX-S1000F; Cheap project: CBR900RR FireBlade
Remember kids, bikes aren't like lego. You can't easily take a part from one bike and then fit it to another.

[jayaraj158]

You can delete them .
As the name suggests, they are temporary and are used when some application is run and are created for hat specific purpose.
You can use some software like iolo system mechanic for the purpose ,or use disk clean up wizard.

____________________
"CHANCE FAVOURS THE PREPARED ONE"

[jayaraj158]

You can delete them .
As the name suggests, they are temporary and are used when some application is run and are created for hat specific purpose.
You can use some software like iolo system mechanic for the purpose ,or use disk clean up wizard.

____________________
"CHANCE FAVOURS THE PREPARED ONE"

[The BeefMeister]

Cheers people. Good job they don't harm anything, I deleted a few...hundred of them earlier.

A lot of them started with 'kmd' and I thought that would be something to do with Kazaa Media Desktop, which I don't have any more.

Oh well, If they're not going to harm anything I'll get rid of some more.

Thanks again.
____________________
"Put your hands up motherstickers, this is a f*ck up!"

[Mattastic]

Some .tmp files are needed whilst your system is running (I think). They usually get deleted when you shut down correctly.
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Too skint to buy a bike

[Kickstart]

Hi

You can delete them, but only once they are no longer used. Basically for safety restart the machine and then delete any that have a date / time stamp before you restarted it.

They are seperate from the swap file. Windows 3.0 used a swap file!

All the best

Keith
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Traxpics, track day and racing photographs - Bimota Forum - Bike performance / thrust graphs for choosing gearing

[hush]

Windows won't let you delete .tmp files (or any files for that matter) that are currently in use. As the .tmp files are only used whilst needed, and once they become available will not be needed again, you can safely delete them without needing to restart.

It's a shame that the software creating them (often install programs etc) don't delete them once they are no longer needed, but I'm sure they'll get to it eventually...

[Git]

After reading this thread and consulting the computer geek next door I have just removed 3,290 .tmp files from my system, she now flies along and has not died.














Yet.

[hush]

<--- Computer geek (not next door) LOL - Incidently anyone know of any System/Network Admin jobs going (not Linux/Unix network base though - whilst I have meddled a little I'm a Windows (NT/2000/XP preferably, though happy to work on all versions from 3.11 for Workgroups to all current releases) guy...

[Beechy]

.tmp files are temporary files used by Windoze and Windoze applications to store temporary data until it needs to be persisted elsewhere. A good example of this is if you were downloading a big file from the internet - whilst it is downloading it's stored in a temporary directory (with a .tmp extension). When it completes, the contents of the file are moved to the location you specified and the .tmp file is deleted.

This is why if you don't shut Windoze or its applications down cleanly your system gets over-run with orphan temporary files.

A swap file on the other hand is a file on disk which Windoze uses to expand it's memory - when programs run they expand into memory. If there's not enough memory available a space on the disk is used to hold information until the computers ready to 'swap' the contents of the memory around and continue processing.

All OSes use swap files, obviously disks are slower than memory so the processing of swapping harms performance - hence, more memory = better performance
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[Kickstart]