Temporary Internet Files
By: Arie SlobAnother source of "disappearing" hard disk space are the Temporary Internet Files. To speed up your Internet browsing, pages, graphics and other page elements are stored in your browsers cache. It's worth it to clean this cache from time to time:
Internet Explorer 4.x
- From IE's menu, select View > Internet Options
- On the General tab, press Delete files under the Temporary Internet files header
Note:
The Internet Explorer 4 cache is seriously flawed. One of these flaws will result in the growth of the Index.dat files, even if you delete your cache using the method described above. Another flaw will sometimes have the effect that although you wanted to delete all files, many files will be left in the IE4 cache.
To work around this:
- (re)Start Windows in MS-DOS mode
- Start SmartDrive (Disk Cache) by typing Smartdrv 5120 (where 5120 is the amount of memory in KB to be used by SmartDrive). This will speed up the operation considerably
-
Type Deltree <your tif dir>
where <your tif dir> should be the path to your Temporary Internet Files. The default is C:\Windows\Temporary Internet Files. You would have to put quotation marks (" ") around this command, or use: C:\Windows\Tempor~1
- When done, restart Windows. Your Temporary Internet Files directory will be re-created.
Netscape Communicator 4.x
- From Netscape's menu select Edit > Preferences
- Click on the + sign next to Advanced in the Category window
- Select the Cache entry
- Press the Clear Disk Cache button
