Windows 7 Home Premium Disk Cleanup

I have used the Disk Cleanup facility for the first time for OS(c). There are two items listed amongst the possibilites for deletion, each with 189Mb listed as capable of being deleted but which, in practice, refuse to delete. I select these items, press OK and then instruct to delete when the little window pops up. It seems to go through a deletion process (a progress bar appears) but when I go through the Disk Cleanup process again to check that the files have gone there they still are. These are:-
A. System error memory dump files.
B. Debug Dump Files.
I haven't a clue what these files are or whether they are incapable of being deleted. The description of these files in the Disk Cleanup 'box' seems to give no real clue as to what these files are or how they come to be on my machine.
Can anybody cast some light on what I am dealing with. I wouldn't bother except that two lots of 189Mb seem quite large to me and there seems little virtue in having them on the machine if they are not needed.
I have Windows 7 Home Premium running on a DELL Inspiron 560T computer. I have filled in quite a lot of the data of my machine but don't know if others can see this.

Hi Jeff

A tutorial on disk cleanup can be found here:
Disk Cleanup - Open and Use

I believe that the two files (A and B) that you have mentioned are system files.
One of the experts on this site will provide further feedback as to those files.

hope this helps and regards

Dump files are created by Windows because of a Stop error or when your system stops responding. They contain information and error codes on what caused the failure. Assuming that your computer is working fine and there is no pending problem which requires resolution, they're safe to delete and shouldn't damage your computer. However, the safe practice would generally be to retain such files and not clean them up on a daily basis because they can be very handy when the system is giving errors. On my system, i clean them up only once in six months or so if i'm certain, everything's fine and dandy.

If Disk Cleanup is not doing the job properly, you can use a 3rd party app like CCleaner. That too has options for excluding certain files and also helpful tooltips.

Thank you Lomai and Bill2 for your contributions. I will proceed with caution. There was an occasion when the computer went to sleep after the allotted time for being 'silent'; when I woke it up the machine froze and woudn't respond. I had to re-boot and I turned off the 'sleep' function and it hasn't happened again. The machine has been working fine apart from that episode. Maybe that freeze-up accounts for the existence of these files. Bill2 you don't say how you manage to delete these type of files. Is there some magical way of doing it outside of Disk Cleanup?

I already mentioned in my previous post, use CCleaner. I use that, ages since i used the built-in disk cleanup tool.

Thanks Bill2. Sorry, I saw the reference to the cleaner but for some reason it hadn't logged with me that you were using it yourself. On reflection I should have made the connection. Unfortunatley I had a bad experience with CCleaner on my earlier XP computer when the computer was quite old and had slowed up considerably and I was trying to tidy up the registry. There were both good and bad references to the software on the internet and I took a risk because I had nothing to lose. From then on the computer went into a tail spin - even after I tried to 'restore' the previous registry settings. I am not an expert, as you will have gathered, so in view of what happened before I am particularly nervous about employing that type of third party software on my brand new machine (though I have successfully used East-Tec eraser for a few years on 'deleted' files without problems).

englandjeff,

If you have had a bad experience with the registry clean component of ccleaner, just ignore it. The file cleaner and registry cleaner are 2 separate features of CCleaner. In fact, at the risk of being lambasted by some users, let me say that registry cleaning is a highly overrated feature UNLESS you're getting registry errors. E.g. after uninstalling an app, you may find an annoying popup at startup saying so and so dll missing or so and so could not be found. But that happens because of incomplete uninstallation which leaves behind orphan entries in the registry and phantom startups. In such situations, i do find the registry cleaner of CCleaner most useful. But running that feature as a routine thing doesnt really help IMO because the registry is so huge that a few dozen entries here or there doesnt really give you any performance boost or whatever its supposed to do.

Bad experiences like yours may happen because some required registry key was accidentally deleted. So go ahead and just use the regular file cleaner in CCleaner. Let me again say, CCleaner has a long list of options in which you can choose what type of files you want to delete and which ones to exclude from cleaning. Start conservatively, then gradually explore more options.

Another thing i'd just like to mention, why are we all so obsessed with cleaning and squeezing out every last drop of hard disk space? All of us have huge hard drives these days and if a small fraction is actually taken up by temp/dump files, we go into a tizzy. But we dont think for a moment before installing massive apps that take gbs and gbs.

Sorry for the long post.