Temporary Internet Files - Pros/Cons
RIVER BENDER - January, 2011
What are temporary Internet files? Every time one visits a website using Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, files downloaded with each web page are saved to a temporary Internet folder, creating a cache of the web page on your computer's hard drive. The next time you visit the cached website, only changed content needs to be downloaded from the Internet since the unchanged data is already available in the cache. Sounds like a good idea doesn't it? Maybe. It depends on a number of factors which we'll discuss.
Temporary Internet files, unlike cookies, are much larger and if left to accumulate can eat up your hard drive with lots of megabytes. But fortunately you can limit exactly how much storage you're willing to allow for them by going to your Internet Explorer browser and selecting Tools/Internet options/General/Browsing history/Settings. You can also decide how many days to keep a list of sites visited or even have all temporary files deleted every time you turn your computer off. What settings do you use? That's the problem. It's pretty much going to depend on how fast your computer is, how fast your connection is, how much RAM and how big your hard drive is. It's almost a trial and error situation. You need to play with the numbers and see how it goes.
Temporary Internet files should definitely be appealing to those with a slow dial-up connection because web pages are increasingly loaded with graphics that take a long time to download whereas with faster broadband it's not a problem. So having a cache of those graphics in your computer will enable the webpage to display faster, assuming, of course you have enough space on your hard drive for the cache. If not, your PC could get sluggish doing other offline tasks. So we're back having to play with the numbers to determine what's best for your computer.
The ugly part about temporary Internet files is that they have been known to contain viruses, inappropriate images or text and files that could leak personal information to websites. This can happen when you permit virtually unregulated access to your hard drive. In a matter of seconds popups can appear from a website you've never visited before. So is it best to get rid of all temporary files? Maybe, maybe not.
For those using free CCleaner (www.ccleaner.com) the default setting is to clean out all temporary Internet files and cookies every time you run the program, but you can change the setting. I have a broadband connection so I generally run CCleaner often with the default settings after extensive browsing because there's really no need at my speed to have a cache of websites. I've even set the limit to 50MB. I also played around with not deleting temporary Internet files on both Windows XP and Vista and frankly didn't notice much difference, except in one case where I loaded over 700 photos in Windows SkyDrive that I wrote about last month. In that case, even at my broadband speed it was slow displaying the page until a cache of the photos was created that allowed the page to display much faster.
In conclusion, my suggestion is to not be afraid of temporary Internet files but be aware that they can be good, bad or ugly depending on your particular situation. I could find no consensus suggesting that they should either be deleted or allowed to accumulate. Some folks delete them all as a first step in an unknown problem. If you're not using CCleaner, which I suggest everyone use, you can see all temporary Internet files by clicking on "View Files" at "Browsing History" mentioned above. You'll see cookie files there too but they're in a different folder and won't be deleted when you clean out the Temporary Internet file folder.