To clean up your Windows 7 User profiles you have to follow the steps explained here.
One of the steps to obtain a clean user profile is to Delete your Temporary Internet Files and Temp Files.
To clean your Windows 7 user profile you can use Disk Cleanup (press Windows start button and type “Disk Cleanup”). If you can see in this instance the windows 7 temp files were taking roughly 100 GB. That is a lot, however given the purposes for which this computer was being used it is acceptable. Disk Cleanup could not delete the entire 100 GB of the drive because some of the data was locked by the Operating System’s running services (run services.msc to see more). Disk cleanup can delete The temporary internet files on your windows user profile as well. Just scroll up and down and select the check marks next to the items you want to initiate the user profile cleanup.
If you want to do a user profile cleanup manually you have to know where all these folders are. The Windows 7 temp files are located here: C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Temp. The temp folder is a hidden folder.
The Windows 7 Temporary Internet Files location: C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5 You can copy and paste but change the ”YourUserName” with the actual user name on your computer and run the path from The Run Dialog Window. Or %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5. You can just run “%userprofile%” in the run dialog window to open your windows user profile.
Or copy and paste the %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5 path without changing %userprofile% and you should find the temporary internet files and folders. To view the Windows 7 temporary Internet Files you need to change the hidden settings from Folder Options. To do this open any folder (Windows Start Button -> Documents or Windows Start Button – Computer) and on the top left click the organize button hover over the pop up menu to the Layout Section and click on the “Menu Bar“.
Now click on the Tools-> Options and select Show hidden files, folders, and drives. If you want you can also deselect the check marks on the other three options below it.
After you have set Windows Explorer to show hidden files you can view where the Windows 7 Temporary Internet Files are and you can delete them manually from inside of the Content.IE5 folder. Just a small tip. If your files and folders disappear from your desktop and mostly everywhere on your computer. Then you can use the same method to view them. This also means that your computer is infected with some malware.
If you just want to delete your Temporary Internet files on Windows 7 you can use the Internet Options and under the general tab press the delete button in the browsing history area.
Just click the delete button and follow trough to the next window.
Here select from the pop up window what you want to delete. I suggest keeping the history because it is automatically deleted every 20 days and it is useful to find a website back if you forgot its name.
- Preserves Favorites Websites data Select this check mark if you want for your user name and other data to show up on your favorites website
- Temporary Internet Files These you always want to delete, the web is always changing and cashed files don’t apply
- Cookies you want to delete the cookies from time to time, because many of then are just tracking your activity, just preserve the Favorites website data
- History I always keep history, you never know when you want to go back and you just can’t remember the website, That why history is very good.
- Form Data This is the data which you fill out like you address phone number email and so on.
- Passwords If you think your security is compromised here you can delete all the password Internet Explorer has retained for you
- InPrivate Filtering Data This Feature is Connected with InPrivate Browsing feature where no information should be saved from your browsing session if you want to be completely anonymous. So if you use the InPrivate feature then delete the data.
You need to remember that Disk Cleanup doesn’t clean up all users profiles, It only cleans up one windows 7 user profile.
Now a short recap:
- Disk cleanup performs a single windows user profile cleanup.
- To get more options on Windows 7 Temporary Internet Files use the Internet Options Browsing history
- To manually delete the Windows 7 temp files and temporary internet files we have to know their locations. These folders are hidden, so we have to un-hide the hidden folders and files.
That’s how you perform a clean up on Windows 7 User profiles.
If you want to renew your windows user profile you have to delete some registry keys for that run “regedit” and navigate to the key in the quotation marks: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList”
If there are multiple user profiles like in the image above just look on the right hand side of the image for the ProfileImagePath. That should help you figure out to whom the profile belongs and if this is the user profile you want to renew. Just rename the folder of the profile in the c:\users folder and then delete the registry key. This has to be done from another administrative profile. It can’t be done from the same profile you want to delete or renew.
Other computer paths that might be of interest:
Windows 7 History or Internet Explorer history: C:\Users\%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\History
Windows 7 History or Internet Explorer history in the registry settings: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\Cache\Extensible Cache
Expand the registry key and you will find a few entries with about history. they contain the locations where history settings is held in regedit.
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\History\History.IE5\MSHistXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\History\History.IE5\MSHistXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\History\History.IE5\MSHistXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
the “xxxxx” seems to be some sort of hashing and therefore is different for each user profile.
Outlook
outlook temp files %userprofile%\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook
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