In Windows, temporary files exist anytime and anywhere, and IE also has its own temporary folder. Here, let’s study the temporary folders of IE together.
Understand IE temporary folders
When you enter the URL in the IE address bar and press Enter, IE will first look for the web page content corresponding to the URL in your hard disk. If found, call out the content of the web page and display it in the browsing window, and then connect to the website server to read the updated content and display it. If it cannot be found, IE will directly connect to the server and download the web page content on the service. While displaying it in the browsing window, save the content of the web page on the computer's hard disk. The default save location is the "C:\WINDOWS\Temporary Internet Files" folder. This is the temporary folder of IE, which stores the content of the web pages you have recently browsed.
Set up IE temporary folders
Since the IE temporary folder stores the content of the web pages you have viewed, it can improve your browsing speed in the future. However, the default settings of this folder may not be the optimal settings for your computer. In order to achieve the optimal effect, you can change these settings according to the actual situation. The method is as follows:
1. Click the "Tools\Internet Options" command, and the system will pop up the "Internet Options" dialog box.
2. Click the "General" tab, under "Internet Temporary Files", click the "Settings" button, and the system pops up the "Settings" dialog box (as shown in Figure 1).
Figure 1
3. Under "Internet Temporary Folders", drag the slider under "Used Disk Space" to change the disk space that the IE temporary folder can use. If you have sufficient hard disk space, you might as well set the value larger; otherwise, set it smaller. Setting this value is larger can improve browsing speed.
If your computer has multiple partitions, you can specify other folders to store IE temporary files by clicking the "Move folder" button. The system pops up the "Browse folder" dialog box. After finding and clicking the new temporary folder, click the "OK" button. Of course, you must restart the computer before storing IE temporary files using the new location.
4. Click the "OK" button in turn to close each dialog box.
Clear temporary files
The existence of IE temporary files can indeed improve browsing speed, but these temporary files occupy disk space and expose your online whereabouts. If you want to delete these temporary files of IE, please follow the steps below:
1. Click the "Tools\Internet Options" command, and the "Internet Options" dialog box will pop up.
2. Click the "General" tab, under "Internet Temporary Files", click the "Delete Files" button, and the "Delete Files" dialog box will pop up.
3. If you want to delete the offline temporary files at the same time, select the "Delete all offline content" check box and click the "OK" button (as shown in Figure 2).
Figure 2
In fact, after you perform the above operations, when you check the properties of the IE temporary folder in "Explorer", you find that the folder still occupies several megabytes or even dozens of megabytes of disk space. Why is this? In fact, there is also a file named "" hidden in the folder at this time. The file is an index file that stores the indexing of the temporary IE file. The more web pages you browse, the larger the file capacity. But in the Windows graphical interface, you cannot see and delete the file. To delete the file, follow these steps:
1. Click the "Close System" command in the "Start" menu, and the "Close Windows" dialog box will pop up.
2. Select "Restart the computer and switch to MS-DOS mode" and click the "OK" button.
3. Type the following command at the DOS prompt and press Enter after each line of command:
cd c:\windows\tempor~1\content.ie5 (If you are not using IE5 or IE6, but IE4, please change this command to:
cd c:\windows\tempor~1)
del
exit
When you re-enter Windows, the system will recreate a "" file in the IE temporary folder. Since there is no index of any IE temporary files that need to be recorded, it is naturally very small.