EraseTemp

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on April 26, 2012

Temporary files tend to become permanent residents of your system, unless you clean them out regularly. Many cleaners miss some of the out-of-the-way places temporary files are cached, though. Nodesoft's EraseTemp is a simple, portable tool that scans your PC for temporary files and folders and deletes anything older than one day as well as old dump files. It ignores necessary files in temporary directories that might cause programs or your system to misbehave if you delete them. It requires .NET Framework.

EraseTemp's user interface is a plain dialog with a log view and basic menu bar. The tool runs automatically when you open it, but when it first runs, EraseTemp runs in test mode. It scanned our system and displayed a report in the log view. We saw nothing of concern, so we reran the tool. This time it did the job, cleaning out old temporary files in places where they'd become too comfortable. EraseTemp does much more, though you'll need to be proficient in Command Line arguments to take advantage of it. If that sound like a job-related conflict, EraseTemp may not be for you. But if you do DOS and don't mind some old-school PC action, you can specify files and folders to keep, skip subfolders, keep or delete files that match the RegEx, and much more.

Beginners and inexperienced users may want to find a more user-friendly tool with more automation or assistance than EraseTemp. For experienced users, EraseTemp's Command Line flexibility might be its best recommendation. It only deletes temporary data, so it doesn't do any harm. But skilled users will get the most out of it.