How to Permanently Delete Cookies

Internet cookies – the ones without chocolate chips – are certainly not as beneficial as the ones mom cooks.  In fact, cookies are small pieces of data in the form of text files that are created when you surf the web.  This information consists of content from various web pages you have viewed.  Cookies are typically stored on your hard drive and called upon by your browser to send them back to a web page in order to view it again. 

The functionality of cookies

Cookies are an important part of daily internet activity, and they serve several functions:

• To remind a particular website that you were a previous visitor.  This information enables you to regain access without problems.
• To speed up the login process on a web page.  When a website asks if it should remember you on a certain computer, it is the cookies that will store the information.  Usually it saves the username, and you must still enter a password.
• To remember information that is pertinent to the website you are viewing.  This could be your name, viewing preferences, and much more.  Websites employ cookies to customize your viewing experience.
• To display a website’s criteria that may be similar or different to what you viewed in the past.
• To make a previously viewed web page load faster.  When you view a page, that content is downloaded into your cookies folder.  Instead of having to download them again, your web browser accesses the content from your cookies and instantly opens the web page.
• Cookies are beneficial to your web viewing experience, but they can also become a problem.  When you have visited a large number of pages, all the files begin to impact the performance of your computer.  In these cases, you will need to delete cookies in order to clean your internet history.

How to view your cookies   

Cookies are saved in a file folder on the hard drive of your computer.  Location of these files actually depends on the operating system you are using.  Users of Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows NT, or Windows 95 will find their cookies in one of these two locations:

C:WindowsCookies or C:Windows\Cookies.

In either case, cookies or other internet files can be easily accessed from “My Computer.”  After finding the folder, you can then view and open the contents of your cookies.  The problem is that these files are often encoded and are not readable by the average user.   

How to delete cookies to improve your computer’s performance

When deleting cookies, you are essentially erasing your internet’s history.  This means that pages may take a bit longer to load, and your settings for a particular site will be deleted.   However, deleting cookies will also save space on your hard drive and optimize computer performance.  Cookies can be erased by deleting all text files found within that folder.  While this may solve your problem momentarily, data for most of the cookies will not be deleted because they are saved in an index.dat file.  This file is often hidden from the cookies folder and makes it difficult to permanently delete them on your own. 

Getting rid of cookies permanently and cleaning up internet file fragments does not have to give you the blues.  This can be done rather effectively with the aid of a solid history cleaner.  Windows Washer from Webroot & PatretoLogic Privacy Controls 2.0 is advanced software that not only permanently deletes cookies, but shreds the information in those tricky index.dat files. This program will thoroughly erase temporary internet files and the history of your browser, along with other desktop searching applications such as Google, Windows, Yahoo, and AOL.  This program provides privacy and protection for both your computer and personal information – allowing you to enjoy the performance of your computer safely and quickly.