Tag Archives: temp

fake AV and deleting temp folder

Computer Aid Posted on by

As many of you have noticed, there has been a big jump in the number of fake antivirus infections lately.

Some have a nasty habit of hiding files (particularly my documents, pictures, music, etc).

But unhide.exe (from bleepingcomputer.com) easily fixes that.

But there is another one that makes this that little big more dangerous:

It moves the desktop, and start menu to subdirectories within the windows TEMP folder… its amazing how many people will use their desktop as a form of “My Documents”!

Most techs will try to fix things by booting a CD/USB image of UBCD4WIN or a linux equivalent, and it doesn’t take long, before the temp folders are emptied in order to make a scan run a bit faster (fewer files to scan).

Once that happens, it can be difficult to remember which start menu items to recreate… Unless you find you can do a system restore!

So now, you can’t just delete the temp folders of an infected PC anymore, at least not without first taking a good peek at whats in there.

Windows still doesn’t clean up its temp files

Computer Aid Posted on by

If you believe Microsoft, something as modern as Vista should be a shining model of efficiency.

Well, I recently found an example of inefficiency that seems to go back to the days of windows 95 (or maybe even earlier).

Yep, I’m talking about the temp folder(s).

As Microsoft has waded through the various versions of Windows, the location of the temp folder (or folders) has changed, but the lack of housecleaning hasn’t.

With Vista, I recently got a slow laptop from a customer, and I decided to take a look at:

c:users{username}appdatalocaltemp

And what did I find?

over 4,000 temp files… some over 2 years old.

Sure, you can install something to cleanup the temp files, but average computer users don’t know about computer maintenance… they just assume it get done automatically.

Its amazing how a company will put so much effort (and money) into advanced new features… yet some simple maintenance like cleaning the temp folder at startup time, is totally ignored.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at the latest Windows 7 beta… and it also has the same issue…

It makes me wonder if anyone at Microsoft actually cares about the long-term usability of their windows products.