The incentive to write this article came from my offer to help a fellow club member clean up his hard disk. He runs Win95, and my normal procedure is to clean up the registry with Regclean, back it up to the root directory for safety, then look for backup and redundant files before running Defrag.
There were a few backup files that always creep in with any reasonable computer use, but I was almost shocked to find over 7 000 redundant files in two folders that the owner did not even know were there. Subsequent discussion with other members of the computer community revealed that many users are ignorant of these folders and files that can occupy megabytes of disk space. I suppose it is analogous to driving a car. Not many people care what is under the bonnet or what the principle of the combustion engine is. To use a computer it is not necessary to know much about files and folders or why Windows 95 works. But just as it helps to know when an oil change is needed because of stale oil, so it helps to know when a cleanup is needed because of redundant files. With the enormous space on hard disks these days many users will not agree with my logic, as they will never use all the space available anyway. But bigger disks mean bigger clusters and a bigger percentage of waste space. So I maintain my argument. Besides, many of these files will require occasional updating, requiring time and system resources that could be more profitably used.
The two folders in question are under the Windows folder and are named History and Temporary Internet Files. Both of these are used by Internet Explorer or whatever Web browser is installed. In the History folder there were over 3 500 files, and in the other folder there were over 3 700 files. Just deleting these took several minutes. Let us look at what these files are and how they are used and controlled.
The History files appear as a list of pages that you have visited over time on the Internet. They are there to make it easy for you to return to a site. During any session of Web browsing you should be able to recall the history of your activities and reconnect to any previously visited site without having to open the URL again. A URL is a Universal Resource Locator or address, and our Capital Computing URL is www.pcug.org.au/pcug/radio.
For some reason not all sites are saved in the History folder and, as a learner, I am still trying to find out why. A random entry taken from 53 in my History folder reads: BBC News | Front Page | front page. Right clicking on this and selecting Properties shows me that this is the URL http://www.news.bbc.co.uk, last visited on 02 Dec., updated on 02 Dec., and expiring on 09 Dec. So let us look at the origin and explanation for this.
In my browser under the Favorites menu item I have this URL for the BBC. Obviously on 02 December I accessed this site to check on some news item. If this was my first time here the History item was created. If I was revisiting the site the history item was updated as well. And unless I revisit the site before 09 December it will be deleted from my History folder on that date. These options are set in the browser. In Internet Explore 3 they are reached through View | Options | Navigation. Here I have set 7 days as the expiry time. Here too I have the option of viewing all the files in the folder or deleting them all to start afresh. The other way of viewing or deleting them, of course, is through Windows Explorer.
The files in the Temporary Internet Files folder are more complex. At the moment I have 785 entries ranging from HTML files through JPEG and GIF image files to several with strange extensions. They cover virtually every page and image that I have looked at over a long period. Their purpose is to act as a cache to which the browser can refer instead of constantly having to read from other distant web sources. They serve a very useful function as offline research material by using special programs like UnMozify, but that is beyond the scope of this article and will be covered later. For the moment we will just look at controlling the number and activity of these temporary files.
Once again we use the View | Options path in our browser and choose Advanced. There are two options here - View Files and Settings. View Files opens up a Windows Explorer window that should be familiar by now. Settings allows a number of changes. The most important of these is the percentage of disk space allocated. If you have a 2.1 GB disk, which is common these days, and allow even 12% (which I have seen) you are dedicating 252 MB to a browser cache. There is potential there for a lot of inefficiency. I have set the minimum allowable value of 1% of my drive. In Settings we again have the option of Viewing the files, and also of Emptying or Moving the folder. But more importantly we get to determine how often these files are updated. The frequency ranges from Never, through Every time you start Internet Explorer, to Every time you visit the page. This last option would be necessary for users wanting real time updates of data. The middle option is the one I use to ensure that my cache is kept reasonably up to date. I can always update it to the latest version held on the local cache by my ISP by clicking the Refresh menu item if I think it is stale. Or to get the most recent version available from the remote source I can click Refresh while holding down the Shift key. The Never option would seem to have little practical application but is obviously there for a purpose.
Returning to my colleague with 3 700+ temporary files, I can imagine the activity in updating these every time Internet Explorer is opened. So it is obviously worth looking at what options are stored as defaults in your set-up, and changing them to something more suitable to your style of computing. Remember you should be controlling your computer, not your computer controlling you.
Enjoy your computing.
Copyright © Terry Bibo
tbibo@pcug.org.au
(This item was broadcast on 11th December, 1997)
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