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Cleaning up the mess Internet Explorer make on your hard drive
(Internet Cache and History)
What is the Internet Cache?
Your Internet cache is in the Temporary Internet Files folder on your hard disk. This is where Web pages and files (such as graphics) are stored as you view them. This speeds up the display of pages you frequently visit or have already seen, because it is faster to open them from your hard disk than from the Web. The downside of this is that it takes up space on your hard disk, and it can sometime cause problems in loading a page that you have visited many times before.
What is the Internet History?
Your Internet history is a record of all the sites you have visited. This option gives you the ability to see what sites you have visited. If you visited a site and don't know what the name of the site is, you can try to find it in your history. After a certain number of days, this history will be cleaned out.
Cleanup of Internet Explorer
To clean up the Internet cache and history in IE, you will need to open up Microsoft Internet Explorer.
You should have a menu, as shown above. On the menu you will need to go to Tools.
After clicking on the Tools menu button, you should have a drop down menu as shown below.
From this menu you will need to click on Internet Options...
The Internet Options will open in a new window. The window should look like the one below.
From Internet Options, you have to ability to set options in IE. You will be able to set your home page location, clean up temporary internet files, and clean your history.
To clean up the Internet cache, click on the Delete Files... button as shown in the picture below.
After you click on Delete Files..., a Delete Files window will show up. In this window you need to click the box Delete all offline content; this will make sure all of the cache is cleaned up. After this box has been checked, you are ready to click on the OK button. This will remove all of the cache files.
The next option you can look at under Internet Options is History.
You can change the number of days IE keeps your history. You can also clean out all of your history files by clicking on the Clear History button.
After you click on the Clear History button, it will ask you if you are ready to delete the history. Click OK to delete the files.
While you have this tab on screen, you may want to take a minute to click the
Settings... button and review your temp settings. I recommend setting your browser
to check for newer versions of stored pages Every visit to the page to be sure
that you are viewing the most recent version.
