`Cookies`?

[carlton23]

How,or should I clear cookies

[Buenchico]

(2-part post):

Answering the 'should?' part of your question is probably easier if you understand what cookies are.

When you visit certain sites, a cookie is placed on your PC so that the website will 'recognise you' when you next visit. In some cases that might be for advertising purposes. (For example, this site might want to display different adverts to the last time you visited). In many cases though, cookies are used for 'good' purposes, such as saving you having to sign in every time you visit a site. (I never sign in to the Answerbank because I've chosen to use the 'Remember me' function. That function relies on AB's server spotting the cookie on my PC).

In the early days of the internet it was recommended that you should remove cookies because they take up disk space. These days, with much larger hard drives in PCs, that's not really a valid argument. (You'd need to have hundreds of thousands of cookies on your PC to take up the same space that one small video file occupies).

Cookies are generally harmless (and, as stated above, often useful). There's little reason to remove them unless they're 'embarrassing'. For example, the vicar who uses a PC (loaned by his church) to compile the parish magazine might not want to return the computer with cookies related to sex sites on it ;-)

[Buenchico]

The means of deleting cookies varies slightly from one browser to another. The following is a 'catch all' method:
Go to Start > Search > For Files or Folders and search for 'cookies'.
That will display one or more folders containing cookies.
Double-click on a folder to display its contents.
Click on one of the cookies you want to delete.
If you want to delete ALL cookies, now go to Edit > Select All
If you want to select a list of cookies (starting with the one you've already highlighted) hold down Shift and click on the last cookie in your list.
If you want to select a collection of cookies, spread out among the list, hold down CTRL while clicking on each cookie you want to delete.
Then right-click and select Delete.

Chris

[carlton23]

What a `fully conprehensive` reply, thank you very much Buenchico,

[chas2008]

just to add one thing, make sure you know your passwords/ user names for the various sites you visit , deleting cookies can also remove them.

[VHG]

Note there are now lots of "tracking" cookies that track which web sites you visit, what prooducts you are looking for and so on.

This information is sent back to central servers so adverts on web sites can be targetted at you.

If you run some anti virus or anti malware products they will often list all the tracking cookies they find.

When I do it on my family computer it is not unusuall to find around 500 tracking cookies.

Some anti virus and malware products allow you to delete these tracking cookies after they have found them.

Trouble is, as soon as you start visiting web sites again they start coming back.

The free product WinPatrol does allow you to create a list of cookies that you dont want (by name) and it will delete them if a web site tries to create them.

http://www.winpatrol.com/