Windows users typically rely on tools like CCleaner and the similar tools to remove temporary files. If you use Windows 10, you can actually delete temporary files manually without using any additional tool. Windows 10 has built-in tools which you can use to remove temporary files and other types of unneeded files without installing additional tool at all.

There are several temporary files on Windows 10, including leftover files after updating the Windows 10 versions, error logs, temporary Windows installation files and so on. They don’t actually cause any issue regarding the system performance. However, if you don’t clean them up, they the can cause your system disk space run out more quickly.

Here are how to remove temporary files manually on Windows 10 without installing any additional tool.

Remove temporary files via Settings menu

In Windows 10, you can remove the temporary files via the Settings menu. To do so, open the Settings menu by clicking the gear icon on the start menu.

On the Settings window, select System and click the Storage option on the left panel and click the Free up space now link on the right panel.

Select the file types you want to remove. Since you want to remove temporary files, make sure to tick the Temporary files option. Click the Remove files button.

Remove temporary files using Disk Cleanup

Disk Cleanup is a built-in system cleaning tool of Windows. This tool is available on all Windows versions, including Windows 10. You can also use this tool to remove temporary files on Windows. In Windows 10, you can open this tool via the start menu or Command Prompt by typing cleanmgr. In this example, will demonstrate how to use Disk Cleanup via start menu.

Click the start menu. You can find Disk Cleanup under the Windows Administrative Tools folder.

A tiny pop-up dialog will appear, asking you to select the drive you want to clean up. Since you want to clean up the temporary files of the system, select drive C and click OK.

Select the file types you want to remove. Since you want to remove temporary files, make sure to tick the Temporary files option and click the OK button.

Final thoughts

Windows has built-in tools which you can use to clean up your system to reclaim some Megabytes or even Gigabytes of disk space. You can even set scheduled disk cleanup using Task Scheduler, another built-in tool offered by Windows. Please note that Disk Cleanup won’t delete temporary files of third party apps. Neither if you delete temporary files via the Settings menu. For instance, it doesn’t delete the temporary files of Google Chrome and Firefox.