About; IE cache
Clearing your Internet Explorer cache (files saved for later) folder(s) can definitely improve the overall speed of your computer. It may make your browsing speed a little slower, but the health of your computer increases by being free of all these useless un-allocated images. The IE cache is a little trick used to save every image you view on the internet to a TEMP folder located on your computer so the next time you visit a site the images will load quickly because they've already been loaded previously and saved for quick access. Don't get me wrong, this is a great idea if you visit a webpage frequently and want it to load ASAP. The draw back is there are so many people using social networking sites like Myspace.com which have hundreds of images displayed all over. From the banners, the buttons, the user uploaded pictures, and the ID pictures. They're all saved onto your computer whether you like it or not.
I liked IE, it was enough to get you on the internet and start surfing. I quickly changed over to Mozilla's FireFox once I seen what I discovered on my hard drive. I discovered thousands of files which contained images of people I've never seen before, even on myspace. I noticed pictures of ads and random pictures of peoples family, pets, parties, etc all in these TEMP folders. I was confused because none of this was mine and I sure as hell don't want pictures of people I don't know on my computer. From the security threats on IE to the massive image cache, I had to find a different program to use the internet. That's why I'm a Fire Fox user and that's why I reccomend switching over. I'm not trying to push a product on you, I'm trying to tell you there's alternatives that will make things easier for you.
I promise it's a legit, secure, and wonderful program. I could go all day about the other things you can use it for, such as ripping videos off of YouTube and GoogleVideo to save to your computer, but I'll discuss this later.
How to clean the IE cache
This is a very simple tutorial that I advise one doing once a month or once a week if you continue to use Internet Explorer. This is one of the many ways to remove these files, so if you know of a quick and more direct approach, I'm all ears.
First, access your Disk Cleanup tool through the Start menu. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup.
It should look something like this.(direct link to a picture)
Once you're there, it may ask you to pick a hard drive you want to clean. It will always be your main drive, C:.
It may not ask you for a drive, it may just start gathering files. That's fine, less work for you.
Once it gathers all the files that it is willing to clean, you will see a box like this appear
Here you can see the categories of files. I reccomend checking the boxes next to "Downloaded Program Files", "Temporary Internet Files", and "Recycling Bin". You may check the "Compress Old Files" if you wish, but I like to keep my old files in the original state they're in now. I'm not saying your files will vanish or be low quality, I'm just leaving those files alone for now.
Before you select "OK", lets check out what kind of gunk has collected on your computer, shall we? Go back up to the top there where it has our categories and check boxes and click on "Temporary Internet Files". You'll see a button that allows you to "View Files". Click that and you'll see what you've been lugging around with since you've been on the internet.
A folder will open and show you many other folders. Click around these, coming in and out of each of them. They all contain something, atleast they should. You will notice they contain images you probably recognize and some you don't. This is what IE caches (saves for later) to increase your speeds, but inturn clutters your computer.
After two months of being on Myspace, this is what I've accumulated;
I have no idea who some of those people are. Not only that, look at how many pictures there are in that folder! 872! That's in only one folder!
Once you're done looking around, close the folder and go back to Disk Cleanup. (it will still be open) From there, click "OK" and let it clean out what you selected in the check boxes. It will whipe all of those files out....until you start browsing again. There are ways to limit this or even eliminate it, but that would require another tutorial. In my opinion, this should give you a little bit more of an incentive to make a switch to FireFox. It's free and it wasn't made by a big corporation.
