It used to be in the good old days (before Internet Explorer 8), to delete my cookies and temporary files, I would right click on my email icon in the start menu and choose "internet properties". In the general tab and I could delete my temp files, cookies, saved passwords and browsing history with one click. Well I can still do it this way, but in Internet Explorer 8, this does not delete your web "cache".
Your web cache is another set of temporary files that helps regularly visited web pages load faster. However, it also will store files to web pages that you may never visit again. The cache folder can contain images, shockwave files, flash banners and other files that can be large and eventually take up needed space if not deleted.
I stumbled on to this when I noticed a few things odd on my computer. I sometimes work on websites and it is handy to right click on a web page and choose "view source" to see the html code. All of a sudden one day, this would no longer work. Then when I would defragment, I would look at the files that were being moved, and some were shockwave and flash files that I knew I had not recently added. Some files had Google in the file name- so I knew it was advertising of some sort. And having deleted my cookies and temporary files in the way I always did in the past, these files should be gone. Also, the last time Norton's did a full system scan, it took like 3 hours and I had 1.5 million files scanned, no malware or viruses, but 63 tracking cookies that were deleted. Norton's spent a lot of that time on the "web cache" area, so a light went on in my head. (on a sidenote: I also noticed that when Norton's did an idle (full system) scan, it would never make it all the way through).
I did a Google search on "how to delete web cache" and found the answer. Here is how to do it in Internet Explorer 8:
1. From the Safety menu in the upper right, click Delete Browsing History.
2. Deselect Preserve Favorites website data, and select Temporary Internet files, Cookies, and History.
3. Click Delete.
At first, I was a bit concerned as this took over 5 hours, but it finally did clear and I was good to go. This must have been all the "cached" files since I upgraded to IE8. This did the trick, and I am surprised that there is not more information on the subject. I m not a brainiac, but I am not completely stupid on the computer either. I just want to pass on this information so that it may help people that were in the same boat that I was in. I would recommend to delete your "web cache" at least every month. Yes you will have to re-login to your Facebook, Twitter and other login pages, but trust me, my computer runs like new again...
NOTE: I ran a Norton's full system scan again today (after 2 days surfing) and there were 871,000 files scanned. So deleting the web cache dropped around 700,000 files! This scan took about 30 minutes.
