Can I delete the things in this folder?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve got this folder called cookies I’m sure every one but me knows what its for. But the thing about the cookies folder is its really big i mean really big. the files in it can open but all I see is jibberish. Can I delet them if I can’t read them? Do I really need these files? Should I use the compress comand on this folder to make more room for other stuff would that be safer?

2

There may be a lot of these files, but individually they take up very little space.

If you delete them you will lose personalized settings on websites. For instance if you come here to the SDMB you may need to enter your name and password to post or do other member only stuff. With cookies that information is sent automatically.

It is ok to delete them, as long as you know all your passwords, and don’t mind pages reverting to their default state.

3

Listen to Lobsang. It’s just a pain not to have them. I wouldn’t worry about them, just let the cookies relax

4

If you do need to get rid of your cookies (which, unlike *Lobsang I recommend doing), your browser (which I’m guessing is MSIE) should have a toggle to clear them out. You might want to do this manually, however, since some of the can be things like username/password pairs for various websites, such as this one. Most of them, however, are probably demographic tracking by advetisers or sites you have visited, and therefore do not have any value to you.

5

What you could do is download a good tracker removal utility such as AdAware

http://65.123.25.21/software/adaware/

Have a read of the page to learn more.

There’s a free version.
Run it every coupla weeks and it removes the nasty ad cookies and data miners.

You get free updates as well.

6
      • Run AdAware first, as said (you can usually just run it on your cookies folder, you don’t have to let it scan the entire C: drive). Then if there’s still lots of stuff left in the cookies folder, sort the files by type and delete everything but the cookies.
        ~
7

Adaware does not remove tracker cookies but “spyware”. There are dozens of apps that let you control cookies. If you use Windows (I consider Windows to be cyber slavery.) check out www.analogx.com for some excellent freebies and by all means download and use Adaware often.

8

AdAware 6.0 does remove tracker cookies. Update for free at http://www.lavasoftusa.com/

9

http://guidescope.com – Guidescope is a good free cookie and ad blocking program. I recommend it. Newer versions of ZoneAlarm will also block cookies, which is nice but, IMHO, is a little much for a firewall program.

http://zonelabs.com – Consider getting ZoneAlarm if you don’t already have a firewall. Not that it’s particularly germane to your problem (but see above), but it’s just a good thing to have that’s free, too. :slight_smile:

10

Oh, and, you do need AdAware. It will remove programs you really don’t want and that would be nearly impossible to track down and cleanly remove otherwise.

11

Technically correct, but misleading.

Assuming your partition/drive is formatted as FAT32, your cluster size will typically be 4 kilobytes. Your normal individual cookie might be 1 kilobyte in size, but each file occupies a minumum of 1 whole cluster. So, effectively, each cookie takes up 4 kilobytes. Combine that with the fact that the FAT table is loaded into memory at startup. Thousands of cookies only contribute to the FAT size.

I would suggest, remove all your cookies, then go to a select few sites (like 5 most frequently visited) and only accept cookies related to those domains.