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Internet Explorer & Dial Up Networking Tips

CLEARING TEMPORARY DATA IN INTERNET EXPLORER

Assuming you use Internet Explorer as your web browser, you will find that this program keeps a great deal of data about your internet surfing on your hard drive. Open up Windows Explorer and click on the + sign next to the Windows folder; two of the many subfolders you will see are named History and Temporary Internet Files. The first is where IE keeps track of what web sites you have visited in a user specified period of time. The second is where IE downloads the HTML text, graphics images, etc. that make up those web pages. If you click on the plus sign next to Temporary Internet Folders you will see a number of very oddly named subfolders which are the actual containers for these files.

Now open up Internet Explorer, click on the Cancel button when Dial Up Networking starts to dial out to your Internet Service Provider, and then click on the File menu and click on the menu option Work Offline. If you click on the History button in the Tool bar below the Menu bar, you see a sidebar open up on the left side of your browser screen, taking up part of the space your entire browser window took before. If you click on the View option at the top of this sidebar, you can then choose from several options: By date, By site, By most visited, and By order visited today. Then various folders for web sites you've recently visited will become visible. Click on one of the folders, and then on one of the underlined web site addresses, and voila! the web page, regenerated from the contents saved in Temporary Internet Files, becomes visible in the righthand pane of your browser.

How do you clear out all this data? Very simple: click on the Tools menu, then the Internet Options item, and you will be taken to the Internet Options window. On the General tab, there are 3 main sections: one for setting your home page, another for managing Temporary Internet Files, and the third for managing your History. There are buttons for Deleting the Temporary Internet Files (they will be regenerated once you go online to your ISP and start surfing the net again) and for Clearing the History. You can also set the number of Days back to keep your History, and you can, by clicking the Settings button, set the amount of disk space allocated to the Temporary Internet Files.