Not really Temporary Internet Files

Factual Questions
1

If you thought that doing a Disk Cleanup or even deleting the files by hand got rid of all those Temporary Internet Files, I’m afraid you’re sorely mistaken. I noticed this about a month ago. Short of deleting the directory itself, I’ve tried nearly everything to truly purge the internet cache to no avail. Just do a purge and see for yourself. You won’t see any files when you view the directory except for cookies but a right click and view of the directory properties reveals that thousands of files that are probably tens of megabytes altogether.

So what’s the deal with these so called Temporary Internet Files in Windows (98 in this case if it matters)?

2

I don’t seem to have this problem. I’ve set my TIF cache size to the minimum, delete cookies manually after every session, and have TweakUI and TweakAll set to clear my cache and history after every session. The properties on my cache folders show as many files as I can see myself.

3

Ah ha!

Okay, IE5 Win95 user here. I had to go and look and hey, you’re right. My Temporary Internet Folder, when you right-click on it and select Properties, says it has 81.7 MB of stuff in it, even though I have my Internet Tools set to empty all Temporary Files upon closing the browser (I believe that this also acts to delete all cookies, although that may be in a different spot, I don’t remember).

However, I notice that my Temporary Internet Folder itself contains a file marked “Content IE5”, whose Properties say that it has 81.6 MB of stuff in it. “Content IE5” itself has 4 files in it, that hold cookies, but if you right-click on Properties for them, they all show as having a total of about 80 MB of stuff in them.

And I’m looking at this while I’m connected to the Internet, and it shows 437 cookies in each Content IE5 file.

So I try to delete the cookies. It won’t let you delete cookies while you’re connected. Duh.

Okay, now I’m back–I disconnected and went back and looked at the Content IE5 files and they’re empty of cookies, so it emptied all Temporary Internet Files when I closed the browser, as per S.O.P.

However, right-clicking on Temporary Internet Files and Content IE5 files still shows T.I. Files as having 80MB of stuff in there, and each Content IE5 files as having 20 MB of stuff in there.

So. Internet Explorer 5, when you set it up, sets aside as much space as you want on the hard drive for Temporary Internet Files. It’s already spoken for, whether it has anything in it or not. You can change this (at least for Win95) by going into the Internet Options menu, up at the top under Tools. General–Temporary Internet Files–Settings. There’s a slider to set the amount of disk space to use. I have mine set on 100 MB. So I dunno why my Temporary Internet Files folder thinks it only has 81 MB, but hey, I’m not gonna worry about it.

On this menu you can also tell the computer how often to update whatever pages you may have in your Temporary Internet Files-- “check for newer versions of stored pages”. I tell mine “only upon every visit to the page”, because otherwise every time you turn the computer on, it’ll go to each web page and update it, which really slows things down.