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Cleaning
out your Browser
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by:
Lance
Chambers
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You will collect a lot of junk as you surf the net and not all of it is
malware or spam e-mails.
Temp files and lots of other bits will come along for the rid when
you're on the net. Most of these are harmless and those that aren't
should be handled by your anti-virus and firewall (which I assume you
have running). However, they will slow you down even though they are
harmless.
There are two main culprits - cookies and your Browsers cache.
The cache
stores data from
websites you have visited, so if you return to the same site, unchanged
web pages can come directly from your hard drive rather than over the
net - possibly making for a faster delivery to your screen.
This sounds great and it is in the short term but as time passes files
get old and out-dated and never used. But new pages keep getting saved
into the cache and it grows and grows (unless you have limited it's
size in the Browser preferences) slowing your browser down and using up
hard disk space.
If you do clean them out the next time you visit a site it may load a
bit slower (much slower if you're on dial-up) but overall a clean up is
a better strategy to holding old cache files; especially if you have
limited available disk space.
Cookies
are little
bits of data, again collected from sites you visits, that contain
information about you that a web site might need if you revisit - like
an e-store that might help you by remembering what you have already
ordered the next time you visit.
To see how to clean out your browser cache click here.
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