What Are Temporary Internet Files?What are Temporary Internet Files? Where is the Temporary Internet Files folder? How to delete Temporary Internet Files?
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Mil Incorporated November 27, 2006
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Mil Incorporated |
Mil Incorporated was founded with an ambitious objective to be a
trusted software partner for individuals and enterprises around the
world. Mil Incorporated provides software security and privacy
solutions that incorporate state of the art technology, security
expertise, and substantial resources. Web address: http://www.milincorporated.com/
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What are Temporary Internet Files? Temporary Internet
Files are, in fact, the cache of the Internet Explorer. This means that
when you load a web page with Internet Explorer, it is saved on your
computer so that if you later decide to open the same page again, it
will open a lot faster. Temporary Internet Files improve speed of web
browsing and also make possible so called offline browsing, which gives
you the ability to open the web pages from cache even when you are not
connected to the Internet.
Despite all these positive things
about Temporary Internet Files, they have one big drawback: they
compromise your privacy. Everyone with access to your computer can look
into your Temporary Internet Files folder (location of this folder is
discussed here) and see the sites that you have visited in the past.
You can manually delete the contents of Temporary Internet Files folder
(explained here) but this will not erase all traces of the pages
because a special file called Index.dat is placed in this folder and it
will still preserve the names and even the dates of your first visits
to many pages.
Where is located Temporary Internet Files folder? The
location of the Temporary Internet Files folder depends on the version
of Windows and whether or not you are using user profiles.
If
you have Windows XP or Windows 2000 then Temporary Internet Files are
in this location (note that on your PC they can be on other drive
instead of drive C): C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\
If you have Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows NT or Windows 95 then index.dat files are in these locations: C:\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\ C:\Windows\Profiles\\Temporary Internet Files\
Note
that on your computer the Windows directory may not be C:\Windows but
some other directory. If you don't have Profiles directory in you
Windows directory don't worry - this just means that you are not using
user profiles.
How to delete Temporary Internet Files? To delete Temporary Internet Files manually, do the following things:
1.
Start Internet Explorer and click Tools menu, then select Internet
Options... from this menu. This will open the Internet Options window. 2.
Click General tab and then find in the section Temporary Internet Files
the button Delete Files... and click it. A new dialog box opens. 3.
In the Delete Files dialog box, click to select the Delete all offline
content check box if you want to delete all Web page content that you
have made available offline. 4. Click OK to delete the files. Note
that if you are doing this for the first time, the deleting can take a
large amount of time, so be patient.
WARNING! This will
most probably delete all visible items in the Temporary Internet Files
folder (except cookies) but a number of invisible traces may remain in
the index.dat files. The only way to be sure that you are getting rid
of all traces for good is the usage of specialized privacy protection
program like Mil Shield - a powerful privacy protection program that
was designed specifically to clean and shred the Temporary Internet
Files. Additional benefit is the ability to preserve the tracks from
some chosen by you sites (selective cleaning), which makes your
browsing more comfortable and safe (it is rather suspicious to always
have empty history, cookies and Temporary Internet Files - it is better
to leave some tracks from "innocent" sites). Mil Shield also cleans all
other tracks as index.dat files, cookies, history, cache, AutoComplete
records, UserData records, history of recently used folders and
documents and many more.
More information about the article: http://www.milincorporated.com/a-temporary-internet-files.html
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