Process Explorer

Nearly everyone in the business world has had occasion at hundreds of time to press CTRL + ALT + DELETE in Windows in order to deal with stalled out applications and other problems. Not everyone realizes that Windows makes available an advanced version of the Task Manager named Process Explorer, which is available for download here, https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653 . Process Explorer provides many more options for deleting unwanted files. It's freeware, and is put out by Sysinternals which has been acquired by Microsoft.

This task manager allows you to right click on an individual file and select 'Kill Process Tree' to deactivate the active file any any files associated with running a program.

Disk Cleanup

If you're running out of space on your hard drive on a Windows PC, try running Disk Cleanup. To run it, right click on your C drive in Windows Explorer and select 'Properties'.

Click on the Disk Cleanup button and Windows will automatically calculate how much space can be saved by removing several different types of files.

It is safe to remove most of these files, but do not select the option for Windows ESD installation files. You will need these to return your PC to its factory settings.

You can safely remove temporary internet files; .tmp files; thumbnails; windows update files and archived error reports. After you click on the option for 'Clean up system files', Windows will make additional calculations. At this point clicking on 'OK' will clean up your hard drive.

Deleting thumbs.db files

In Windows Explorer it may be common to find thumbs.db files. These are used to make it possible to view thumbnail images faster. Particularly in directories with large numbers of PDFs, you may find many of these files and not be able to delete them. This is especially a problem if you want to get rid of subfolders containing these files. Simply right clicking on the file and selecting 'Delete' while in 'Details' view may fail, and Windows will give you a message like this:

If you encounter this problem try changing the Windows explorer view from 'Details' to 'Content', you should be able to delete the thumbs.db files.