Clearing your Internet Browser’s Cache…

Clearing your Internet Browser’s Cache…

This month we are going to review something really quite important in terms of your computer’s health. From time to time you might be asked to “clear your cache” (it’s pronounced the same way as cash by the way). Maybe it will be your bank asking you to do this because of a problem accessing the website or some other person advising you to do it in order to try to fix a potential problem.

So, what is Internet Cache? Well, every time you use your computer, tablet etc. to browse the Internet, you download the contents of the page that you’re visiting. Things like images of logos, buttons, page text, that sort of thing essentially everything that you need in order to display the website page that you’re visiting. Your computer keeps these downloaded items so that when you re-visit the page at a later date it can check to see if it needs to download them again and if they have changed then it will do that, however if they haven’t changed then your computer will display the item that it downloaded previously. In doing this your computer helps to both make your Internet experience faster (displaying a logo that is already on your computer is much faster then having to download it from the Internet again) and it also saves the server that hosts the website from having to send a file to you that you really don’t need.

These downloaded files are stored in a thing called your computer’s Internet Cache and from time to time you may need to clear your cache. This is usually due to the page not displaying correctly on your computer. Thankfully, clearing your cache is pretty straight forward and can be done easily yourself.

The instructions for clearing your cache are specific to the program that you use to browse the Internet so there isn’t sufficient space in this article to cover all of the various browsers out there. There is however a very handy website that has instructions for all of the most common browsers. You can find it by visiting www.refreshyourcache.com – just select the program that you use and you will get a nice set of instructions, together with pictures for you to follow.

It’s usually a good idea to restart your Internet browser after you’ve cleared your cache and another handy tip is to press CTRL + F5 this will refresh (re-download) the current website that you are viewing and can sometimes clear issues that are related to Internet cache.