Have you ever had an unexpected out of drive space message appear out of the blue or when you are attempting to install a new or updated program. If you have viewed the amount of space available on your hard drive and noticed that your disk space has disappeared, and wondered where it went there’s a good chance that the Internet Explorer is using a big chunk of it.

Most Web pages are made up of multiple files, including the HTML file that creates the page and various graphic, sound, and script files that display on the page.

Before Internet Explorer can display a page, these files must be stored on your hard disk. The location to which these files are copied is called the Internet Explorer Cache. You can imagine how much space gets used when you surf thousands of Web pages!
Fortunately, there’s a way of getting some of that lost disk space back. First, open Internet Explorer the way you usually do (usually by clicking on the blue e on your desktop), then from the menu bar select Tools | Internet Options.

Next, you’ll see the Internet Options properties sheet. Select the General tab. There is a button under Temporary Internet files that allows you to delete files, click on it.

This button refers to all of the cached Web pages that are stored on your system. Although clicking this button will clear the cache, you still need to prevent it from filling back up. So, click the Settings button. You can control the maximum amount of hard disk space that the Internet Explorer cache is allowed to use.

If the current number is too high, lower this number to meet your needs. As a rule of thumb I select about 100MB of my hard drive.

You also can use the Move Folder button to relocate the cache to another hard disk or partition with more free space.

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Until we meet again, have a virus free week!