Disk Cleanup On A Domain

[Bigaldoc]

One of my "volunteer" jobs, recently started, at the nursing home is helping out a little on some of their computers in the building. I have an "administrator" account but I'm not sure what privileges that entails. I just do little stuff like run Malwarebytes, and stuff like that.

They have an employee computer lab with eight computers on their domain. The staff uses it for training, etc. and employees use those not only for "work" purposes like time reporting, but also for pleasure when they're on break.

I'd like to rid each of the machines of temporary files that seem to slow down not only boot times but also the running of something like Malwarebytes. I don't think it's possible to run XP's Disk Cleanup on all the various employee profiles, is it? If not, is there an alternative method that doesn't involve accessing (logging in) on each profile?

[John Gray]

I used to run PSEXEC \\pcname CMD /C DEL C:\*.TMP /S to get rid of temporary files on pcname. Personally I avoid Disk Cleanup because I'm never really certain precisely what it does. You can run CCleaner from the command line, but I haven't ever tried.

I run DEFRAG C: by the same PSEXEC mechanism, and it takes about 4-15 minutes per PC on 40 GB partitions, about half full, when run weekly.

(I'm assuming you have an XP domain; I don't think I'll be around long enough before we move to Windows 7, so haven't thought about Windows 7 administration.)

[Bigaldoc]

Thanks John. I won't even go near ccleaner since I'm not experienced with it.

[Bigaldoc]

I used to run PSEXEC ... <snip>

A followup question, if I may please?

I wonder, since I'm sitting at each machine anyway, and logged on as an admin, what would be wrong with simply using the:

• • DEL C:\*.TMP /S

command from a command prompt on each machine?

[John Gray]

Nothing at all! But I don't want to go round to 23 different PCs and log onto each! I can wake each up with a Wake-on-LAN magic packet, and do everything from my own PC (or, overnight, with a scheduled task).

"Remote administration means never having to say you're sorry..."*!

* because you're somewhere else!

[stuck]

Thanks John. I won't even go near ccleaner since I'm not experienced with it.

In my experience if you use Ccleaner 'as is' on it's default settings and DON'T use the registry cleaner feature, it will remove all sorts of temp files and not screw anything up.

On the other hand if you take Ccleaner and tick every box it offers and run it without any thought for the consequences you might find some things are a little different after it's finished.

I've used Ccleaner for a long time with more than the defaults ticked and it's never screwed up my PC (and that goes back to the days when I had a Win98FE/'Gold' system).

Ken