5 things Windows can automatically clean up on reboot

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

By tweaking your system settings a little, you can increase privacy and clean up disk space.

If your computer is used by several more people, you are afraid that your data may fall into the wrong hands, or you really do not have enough space on your hard disk, you can force the system to delete unnecessary data upon reboot.

Recent documents

Windows remembers which files you edit and displays them so you can quickly access them. Files that you open are shown in the Recent Documents menu and in the drop-down lists that appear when you click the program icons on the taskbar. This is convenient, but if you do not want this data to be saved, then you can do the following.

Open Registry Editor. To do this, press Windows + R, type

regedit

and click OK.

Look for the following path in the sidebar:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER / SOFTWARE / Microsoft / Windows / CurrentVersion

See if there is a Policies section here that contains an Explorer section. If not, they need to be created. Right-click the CurrentVersion section and select New → Section. Name the created section Policies and press Enter. Then, in the same way, create an Explorer section in it.

In Explorer, create a new DWORD (32-bit) value. Name this parameter ClearRecentDocsOnExit and set it to 1. If you want to disable clearing the list of recent documents, change the value to 0.

Paging file

When Windows runs out of RAM, it moves temporary files to the paging file. When you reboot, the RAM is cleared, the paging file is not. But this can be fixed if you don't want it to take up space.

Open the "Registry Editor" and find the following branch in it:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SYSTEM / CurrentControlSet / Control / Session Manager / Memory Management

The ClearPageFileAtShutdown parameter can be found here. If not, create a DWORD (32-bit) value and name it ClearPageFileAtShutdown. Then change its value to 1. To disable paging file flushing, change the value back to 0.

Browser data

History, cookies and other data in browsers are saved, unless, of course, you use private mode. You can configure this data to be cleared when you restart browsers to increase privacy.

Firefox

Open Firefox preferences from the main menu. Select your privacy settings on the left. In the drop-down list, find "Firefox will use your history storage settings." Select "Delete history when Firefox is closed," then mark in the options what you want to delete. Or use the "Always work in private browsing mode" option.

Chrome

To clear cookies on exit, go to Chrome settings, scroll down the settings page to "Advanced", and open the content settings. Activate the option "Delete local browser data".

This way you get rid of cookies, but history and other parameters will be saved. To automatically remove them, use the Click & Clean extension. Install it and select "Delete private data when exiting Chrome" in the settings.

Edge

Go to the Edge settings, under "Clear browser data" select "Always delete this when you close the browser." It should be noted what exactly you want to delete.

Live tile notifications

Live Tiles are colorful tiles in the Start menu that display various information: your mail, weather, news, and more. You can force Windows to flush the cache that contains live tile data.

Start Registry Editor again. Find the path in it:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER / Software / Policies / Microsoft / Windows

Create a section in it called Explorer if it's not there. Add a DWORD (32bit) parameter to it and name it ClearTilesOnExit. Assign the number 1 to the parameter. If you want to return everything as it was, enter 0.

Temporary files

As you work, various temporary files accumulate in the TEMP folder. If you don't want them to take up space, you can delete them.

To open the folder, press Windows + R, type

% temp%

and click OK.

If you need the system to clear the folder on reboot, you can automate this as follows.

Create a text file in Notepad and add the following to it:

rd% temp% / s / q

md% temp%

Select "Save As …" and enter the path to save the file:

% appdata% / microsoft / windows / start menu / programs / startup / temp.bat

If you no longer need to clean up temporary files, delete this file from the Startup folder.