Temporary Internet Files

[tacoeater]

I find that my knowledge of the delete temporary internet files function has been wrong.
I thought this would delete all the goodies within the folders under Content IE5 but all that stuff stays.
[1] Is it safe to manually delete those directories at any time or will it cause problems?
[2] Then the second question is what does the delete temporary internet files actually delete?

[Chrisk]

It is safe to manually delete these files. Dunno.

[Markoman01027]

Hello Tacoeater,

1.You can delete anything that is inside the TEMP folder and TEMPORARILY INTERNET FILES. But do not delete those two directories.

2. When you visit a website for the first time. Internet Explorer or the browser of your choice saves the images, etc of that website on your PC, so when you come back to that site, everything pops up faster.

When you delete your TEMP internet files, you are deleting whatever the browser saved about the website, meaning you will have to wait a few to get those images, etc to load up.

[bounty]

also i noticed videos which i compressed and later opened them while still compressed were extracted to my temp folder (which i didnt know) and i had over 3gigs of old things i didnt need anymore so now i check back now and again to deleted only files- not messing with the history/cookies and the other folder....i just use internet settings to delete my cookies and temp internet files

bounty

[GaryRouth]

You can safely delete the files in the "Content" folders in your Temporary Internet Files. And you don't need to do this manually. From either Start/Settings/Control Panel/Internet Options . . . or from the IE "Tools" menu, select Internet Options --> select the button Delete files, and on the next box, make sure to place a checkmark in the "Delete All Offline Content?" line. This will clear the temp files in the content folders. Also in Internet Options, you'll notice the button with the option to delete Cookies (on the left-hand side), and the button for "Settings" (on your right-hand side). From the Settings dialogs, you can set how large a space you wish to set aside for your Internet Temporary Files, and when you wish them cleaned up.

. . . Gary
[p.s. ...I'm actually just re-phrasing what bounty already said. That's what Literature majors do]

[rambler]

Unfortunately, deleting TIF files via Internet Options DOESN'T delete all the files in the subfolders. Try it and check on the size of the TIF folder by right-clicking on it and selecting "Properties". What's left in there apart from Windows "housekeeping" files are "orphaned" files, i.e. they aren't referenced in the TIF index.dat file. These are files from part-downloaded HTML's, image files, etc. which didn't make it into the index because they didn't fully download, e.g. if you click on a link or hit the back button before a webpage displays fully. The best way to remove them is to delete the entire TIF folder from a DOS reboot.

DELTREE \WINDOWS\TEMPOR~1

[reboot]

Markoman is almost right, rambler has it.
You can, if you boot to DOS, or a DOS diskette, completely remove/delete the temp, and temp internet folders.
Windows will recreate them on boot up, with no harm done, except you lose all your cookies in 98/ME. XP/2K puts the cookies in a different place, and stores them differently.

[galaxian]

Doing a DELTREE on the \TIF folder from DOS won't affect the cookies since they are still in the \Cookies folder. On a reboot, the index.dat file in \cookies will be used to repopulate the pointer cookies in \TIF.

Deleting individual files in \TIF from Explorer will also delete the corresonding cookies in \Cookies, since the ones on \TIF only "point" to the ones in \Cookies. Similarly, deleting individual entries in \Cookies will no affect the ones seen in \TIF, and will leave dangling cookie pointers there.

[SARGE]

Get v 1.16. It works...

http://www.fsm.nl/ward/

[LWHiway]

Thanks Sarge


jef