The temp folder is not always deleted, even after proper shutdowns, and the space can pile up to large proportions. You don't need to delete the folder itself though, only its content. You can safely select everything, and shift-delete the files to permanently delete the files. It will fail deleting everything and will complain that some files are in use. Just say Ignore for all occurrences ...
I wanted to do disk cleanup myself and found a large folder in %localappdata% called Temp. I wondered if deleting the contents of it won't harm my computer. All I know about "temp" folder...
My advice would be to create a new folder in the temp directory and move any files/folders you want to delete to the new folder, check if everything still works.
Since Windows 11 (or maybe earlier) Windows Notepad internally stores unsaved files so if the application (or Windows) crashes they will be still there later. For example, Notepad++ stores those temp
Your system TEMP is not being used here. Only your USER temp is being used. The 3 makes no sense based on your other screen shot. Open the registry editor and look at Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment. You will see where the value comes from there. Look under Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment for the system one.
Anyway, the standard temporary directory in a typical Linux system is /tmp. It is the equivalent of C:\Temp in the sense that it is only the default temporary directory, not universal. Even if /tmp is available, if a user (or the system) has set the TEMP environment variable, the value of that variable should be used instead.
However, the temp files from the MCT download have taken more than 10GB of data somewhere on the drive that I don't know how to locate. Does anyone know where they are located so that I can manually clean them up?
The location you mentioned is the default location for System Environment Variable "TEMP" or "TMP". Applications use the TEMP for storing temporary data, data that will be needed for the specific user session & installers use it to extract the data from the compressed installation files. You can safely delete any files that are not locked. (Locked files are still being used by application for ...
Is it safe to change the User environment variables %TEMP% and %TMP% to point somewhere else (e.g. D:\temp, if D is my other disk with more space)? Also what about changing the system environment variables of the same name to also point to D:\temp?
