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Home arrow How to Clear Your Internet Explorer Cache and Cookies
How To Clear Your Internet Explorer Cache and Cookies - Why Would You Do So? PDF Print E-mail
This article refers to versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x and later.

So you've gone to a webpage several times and it appears to have the same information as last week, or maybe you cant login properly on a webpage that always worked before? Perhaps your getting errors that you shouldn't. Maybe your browser is taking longer than before to close/open? All these things can _possibly_ be corrected by clearing your internet cache and cookies.

The internet cache is a temporary place on your computer where webpages and images that were previously visited are stored for quick access next time you visit a webpage you've been to.

Cookies are different than your cache and are covered in another article (see What Is A Cookie?). Clearing your cookies may improve performance of your web browsing in certain conditions as well. Keep in mind, that if you clear your cookies, all webpages that automatically log you in with a username, will need you to re-enter your userid and password after clearing them.

Clearing your cache and cookies is actually quite simple. At the top of your Internet Explorer, click on "Tools", then in the drop-menu click on "Internet Options". In the popup that appears, General should be the default tab. Then:

To Delete your Cookies: Under the Temporary Internet Files heading click on "Delete Cookies" and click ok to confirm.

To Clear your Cache: Under the Temprorary Internet Files heading click on "Delete Files". A confirmation box will appear and offer to delete any "offline content". This option is for people that save webpages to their hard-drive for later browsing/reading while they are not connected to the internet. Unless you have pages you wish to keep for later browsing offline, it is safe to check this box as well. Now click ok and you're done.

It may be a good idea to restart your web browser after clearing your cache and cookies, although it's not required in the later versions of Internet Explorer.
 
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