Even if you are not worried about privacy on your computer, you may be surprised to realize how much hard drive space all this information takes up. If you are running out of drive space, you may want to delete these files.

How can I delete these files?For Internet Explorer 5 and above, you can follow these directions to clear out temporary files and delete cookies.

1) Open Internet Explorer and click on Tools

2) Click on Internet Options

3) On the General Tab, in the middle of the screen, click on Delete Files

4) You may also want to check the box "Delete all offline content"

5) Click on OK and wait for the hourglass icon to stop after it deletes the temporary internet files

6) You can now click on Delete Cookies and click OK to delete cookies that websites have placed on your hard drive.

To clear the Internet History in IE:

1) Open Internet Explorer and click on Tools

2) Click on Internet Options

3) On the General Tab, in the middle of the screen,click on Clear History

4) Click OKTo clean up other temporary files on your computer in Windows 98 or higher:

1) Click Start, Programs (or All Programs), Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup

2) Choose the correct drive usually C:

3) Check the boxes in the list and delete the files

This deleting method is only good if you want to free space, because normal file deletion only removes a file's directory entry, and leaves the data contained in the file on your hard drive, which can be easily recovered by any average computer user using a undelete utility. If you delete cookies or if you delete history using conventional methods anyone can recover them! Even after a hard drive format, files can be recovered using expensive hardware and software which use forensic latency track analysis algorithms.

There are several good utilities such as

http://www.amicutilities.com/privacy-guard/that

http://www.amicutilities.com/privacy-guard/?v=deletecookies

http://www.amicutilities.com/privacy-guard/?v=deletehistory

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexandru Marias is an IT student mentaining software sites such as: www.downloadsplaza.com ,www.fungamesplaza.com and www.bluedownloads.com