I’m on a Mac, OS X, and I’m not really sure what’s contained in various caches, so I’m alway reluctant to clear them for fear I will lose some setting or something I want.
So if I just let my utility cache cleaner blast all the caches, will I actually notice I’ve lost something, or just be thrilled to notice the speed improvement now that all that digital garbage has been swept away?
computer cache is a temporary storage area for downloaded stuff. the downloaded stuff doesn’t necessarily have to be stuff that you save to your pc like save as… normally every single thing you view on the internet is stored on your pc at least temporarily and every single web page is really just a BUNCH of teeny files like text files and pictures that make up the web page and even some other little stuff that allows you to configure the site a certain way and keep that configuration saved. It is mainly for convenience and speed.
A typical example would be the page heading & logo on many webpages (like the Straight Dope one at the top of this page). That is on each SDMB page. When you open a new SDMB page, your computer has to get that graphic file again. If it’s been saved in your local cache, it’s already there and your computer can display it from there. If it’s not there, then your computer has to download it again. So that takes a bit more time, but that’s the only penalty.
Your computer keeps track of what’s in the ache, and how long it has been there. Whenever it needs more room in the cache, it looks for the oldest, unused files in the cache, and will purge them to have room for new files. So your computer itself is ‘cleaning’ parts of the cache all the time. When you do this manually, you clean everything out, leaving it all empty and open for efficient use by the computer.