By Dewey Williams
Has your 2 Gig hard drive become full, but you can't figure out why? After all, you haven't really put any programs on it, except for maybe Netscape's Communicator or Internet Explorer 4.0. You've been cruising the Web with your latest 56K modem, but that hard drive space seems to decrease each day like some bug or virus is eating it away.
The culprit is most likely your browser! Every web page you see on the screen is saved to your hard drive. Browsers do this because web pages are notoriously slow to change, unless you frequent some of the state-of-the-art sites like ZDNet or MSN. By saving web pages to your hard drive, the browser can check the page the next time you view it. If it hasn't changed, the browser loads the page from your hard drive. This is much faster than loading from the Internet, which improves your `Internet experience' by making things work faster. However, you pay for this increase in browser speed with hard drive space. Each page is saved in a folder on your hard drive. This folder is called the cache (cash) by the Netscape browsers. It is usually located under the Netscape directory, although you can designate where you want the cache to be stored. Internet Explorer puts these downloaded web pages in the C:\Windows\Temporary Internet Files folder. With either browser the cache can be redirected to a different location.
Not only are web pages (text) stored in the cache, but any graphics files associated with these pages are stored here. This can eat up a lot of hard drive space quickly.
If you look in the Netscape cache directory, you will find a number of small files with no extension or with a .htm, .jpg or .gif extension. The JPG (jaypeg) and GIF (jif) files are pictures; graphic files that have been stored on your computer by your browser. So are the files without an extension. Files with the .htm extension are the HTML files that create the web page you see in your browser. Take a look at one of these files in your browser and then look at it in Notepad. You will see a big difference. In Notepad you see all the `programming' that creates the web page.
Looking at the Internet Explorer `cache' shows an example of one of Windows 95's `special' directories. Here you will see not only .gif, .jpg and .htm files but also filenames that look like URL's. You may also see files that begin with the word Cookie. Associated with these files, especially the `cookies', is a field titled expires. This indicates when these special `cookie' files should be deleted from you computer. Some of the cookies on my system have dates with the year set to 1999 or even 2003!
Another difference in the IE cache compared to the Netscape version is that IE records the web page where the file, or cookie, came from.
These files could be 1 to several 1000 bytes (Kb or kilobyte). Don't forget, if you have a large hard drive and it is not partitioned to 500Mb or less, you are wasting up to 32Kb per file. That means the 1000 byte (1 KB) file takes up to 32Kb of hard drive space. (See table for comparison of hard drive size vs. file space wasted).
As you can see, the cache can quickly eat up a LOT of hard drive space with lots of very small files. Fortunately, both browsers give you the tools to control the amount of hard drive space they use for the cache.
In Netscape 4.0 (instructions for Netscape 3.0), go to the Edit/Preferences menu. Expand the Advanced item on the left and choose Cache.
There are several options on this page. First, you see that Netscape Communicator uses two caches, one in memory and one on the disk. You can designate the amount of memory and hard drive space (in kilobytes) for each cache. Just type in the numbers you want to use.
Note: The settings shown may not be adequate for your situation.
The buttons to the right of each cache setting will delete all items in the current cache. You can use this to clean up the memory and disk cache before you create a new setting or to make the browser load a page that you think might have been updated recently.
Below this, you can designate the exact path where you want the browser to store your cache. Put this on the fastest and largest hard drive partition you have to improve browser performance.
Next, you can tell Communicator how often you wish the browser to compare the document in the cache with the document on the Internet. Your selection should take into consideration the speed of your Internet connection, how often the website is updated and how often you visit the site.
Internet Explorer 4.0 also allows configuration of the browser cache. Open IE4 and choose View/Internet Options from the menu. Open the General tab and look at Temporary Internet Files.
The two buttons access the cache features for IE4. `Delete Files' does just that, it deletes all the files in the Temporary Internet Files folder. The `Settings' button takes you to another screen where you can change how often pages are compared, change the amount of disk space allocated, move the `cache' to another drive or view the files and objects in the directory.
To change the amount of disk space used by IE4's cache, move the slider bar. As you do, it shows you how much disk space is allocated and the percent of total hard drive space used. You cannot set IE4's cache to zero, however.
Each browser stores information in memory and on the hard drive to improve the speed of accessing web pages. This speed comes at a cost, paid in hard drive space.
If you find you are running out of hard drive space, check the settings on your browser. You may be able to free up sufficient space by clearing the browser cache and then setting the disk usage for a smaller amount. This will cause your browser to load web pages more often; slowing things down while web browsing. Depending on which sites you visit, how often and the speed of your connection, you may not notice a significant difference.