Originally Posted by
Landing Gear
I have seen the documentation for new computers from Sony, Toshiba and Lenovo (and perhaps others as well) and I have never seen one word about maintenance, particularly file deletion.
I've never seen operating-system-level documentation worth a damn from a PC manufacturer since the end of the Windows 3.x days... not that there's any documentation worth a damn that comes with most PCs these days.
I really like Dell because they provided easy access to the service/disassembly manuals, unlike a lot of manufacturers, but they provide ZERO OS-level documentation with many systems (and when they do it's for system-specific features, or driver installation.)
The business-line Lenovos are similar. I haven't bought Sony ever, and the last time I bought Toshiba documentation tended to be less cursory (not that I bothered to read it, and they were at the time very much LESS than prone to sharing service/disassembly instructions.)
The hardware itself is agnostic to the OS, and it could well be running Linux instead (where many distributions will clear /tmp via cron job.)
This is your field (you're an engineer, if I recall correctly) so you know these things. If a company expects me to, e.g. delete the contents of C:\Windows\Temp they should tell me when, how and why.
Take that up with Microsoft, not the PC manufacturers. They've slowly been making standard (first by recommendation, then by inclusion, and eventually automation) plenty of things like antivirus, file system defragmentation (except on SSDs) and backup, all of which most genuinely computer literate people already knew about.
Indeed, the disk cleanup wizard was offered (starting in XP? a long time ago, at any rate) to clean up stuff like temp files. The system will in some cases ask you if you want to run it
Moreover, (at least prior to the "Metro" world on Windows 8) Microsoft has absolutely no control over what software you run, and how it uses temp space. It would be nice if all applications used it in ways which cleaned up after themselves (and indeed, even back to DOS, every operating system I'm aware of provides APIs which encourage doing exactly that!) but sometimes applications shut down in unexpected ways and can't, or whole machines crash, or applications are simply badly written. Some others use temp directories in ways which are semi-permanent.
If you're not prepared to manage a file system manually, use an iOS device which manages it for you, and accept the massive loss of flexibility that such a model entails.
Without such instruction I think it is indeed unreasonable to expect the customer to do so. How would I know that otherwise?
PC operating systems are not nearly as mature a consumer market as automobiles, and PCs are a much cheaper, and more flexibile/versatile product from . Back when computers cost as much as cars, you had a more reasonable call on documentation (and on an expectation of training.)