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What
are cookies, and why are they on my pc?
What are cookies? You might say cookies are those round, tasty things that help us pack on the pounds and put a smile on our faces. Here I'll attempt to explain what we mean by the term cookie as it relates to the internet.
Some background really quick. When your reading a book and you turn the page, hopefully you can remember what you read on the previous page. When you surf the internet or click on a link to another page, however, by default web pages aren't able to carry information over to the next page. Web pages are what is known as stateless.
There are a few ways that this is overcome but only one of which we will really cover here...
The internet definition of a cookie would be a small file placed on your computer with information related to specific web sites. The information that might be recorded might be the date and time of your last visit, your last purchase, a search you did on a certain site and login validation information about you for user accounts on web sites.
When you load that particular site in your browser again, the browser opens the cookie to retrieve the information for the site to use. This is one of the ways that many web sites overcome statelessness. When you move to the next page on the site, the page requests the cookie with information the previous page wrote to it. In that way, following pages have access to the same information.
If you surf the web often, cookies can stack up very quickly. While cookie files aren't all that big, several thousand of them can begin to affect performance depending on how fast your computer is. Even if they don't seem to affect your computer's performance it is always a good idea to empty your cookies every once in awhile.
If you decide to empty your cookies, however, you need to realize that any of the sites you visit that automatically log you into a user account may require that you reenter your username and password after you delete the cookies.
To empty your cookies simply open Internet Explorer and click tools then click Internet Options. After that click delete cookies (see image below) and then click OK. All of your cookies will be deleted.
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