The Wonderful World of ATF-Cleaner

ATF-Cleaner is a wonderful little temp file cleaner created by Atribune, located here. This is a fairly straight forward application and once you've downloaded it, it can be run quickly and efficiently. I use ATF Cleaner all the time, at home and at work, and it's never messed up my computer. However, it is shareware, so use it at your own risk! Here is a brief tutorial on how to use it:

1) Right click the link and go to "open link in a new window" and wait for the page to load

2) Locate the red letters that read, "ATF Cleaner", which are about halfway down the page. This is the link to the download.


3) Click the red letters and save it to your computer. I would suggest your 'My Documents' folder, but feel free to save it anywhere that you'll remember where it's at.

4) After the program downloads, browse to it's saved location and double click on the icon. The icon is a blue garbage can.


5) After locating the icon, double click it. Microsoft will most likely pop-up a warning like the following:


6) Click Run and the following window will open:


7) For the first time running this, click the 'Select All' option and then deselect the 'All User Temp' item:


8) Next, click the 'Empty Selected' button and let it sit. This is a lot faster cleaner than the Windows Disk Cleanup, but it will still take a bit of time...especially if you don't delete your cookies and temp files very often. I clean mine every other day, so it goes pretty quick. However, the first time I ran it, it took a while, but it cleaned over 2Gbs of data. It may look like it's frozen, but it will eventually pop up a screen like the following:


9) Click OK on the box and then run ATF again, but this time check the 'Select All' item and leave everything selected. The reason why we didn't do this first is because it has a tendency to take hours to clean if you select everything. I'm not sure why, but it does.

10) click OK again and close ATF Cleaner. You should restart your computer after this, but you don't have to do it right away. I would recommend restarting it sometime within the next day though.

If you have questions, please feel free to post them!