question about my Windows\Temporary Internet files

[Belial]

I was having problems deleting them for awhile; it kept hanging on me but finally it seems to have worked.

Only thing is there is still about 15MB of stuff in there: a content.IE5 folder and an index.date file about 15mb in size. Can I delete these things? Or will explorer not work then?

[smcicr]

just run disk cleanup...

but you have a 60 gig drive - is it THAT crucial to save the 15 meg anyways ??

[KickerKid]

Ive never deleted the index.dat file, mine is only 32kb though. I believe it is used as a kinda reference point for other internet files stored on your computer. You can try going to internet options in your control panel to delete the cookies and temp internet files from there. Or use a third party software like Empty Temp Folders .

[Belial]

no it's not that crucial I guess; but it's taking up so much space(still have 45 gigs free on HD though and glad I don't use a 4 gig drive anymore for sure) and since it's in the temp folder anyways and I have no idea what it is: I didn't want any bad programs lurking there.

I did delete some more stuff; I lost my cookies for this site and had to get my password again so I guess some stuff may still be important there.

My biggest worry was that I couldn't get explorer to empty itself for awhile as it kept hanging on me; but it seems to corrected itself after about 20 hangs or so.

I wish they would chose better names for files so I had some idea what all the junk is for.

I was just going to delete the temporary internet folder and everything in it and make another folder with the same name BUT I smelled OS reinstall on that one so I didn't do it: maybe you can or maybe you can't do that I'm not too sure.

[flyerI]

You can delete everythng in the Tempory Internet Folder including the index.dat file. It must be deleted from dos however. I deleter it every few weeks. On shutdown I just restart into MS-DOS and delete it. Go to the following site for a program called "Empty Temp Folders" it will clean out everything except the index files. It is very useful.
http://www.danish-shareware.dk/soft/emptemp/index.html

[rock]

Originally posted by Belial
My biggest worry was that I couldn't get explorer to empty itself for awhile as it kept hanging on me; but it seems to corrected itself after about 20 hangs or so.

This was a problem for me for a long time. I fixed it by limiting the size of the cache at around 16MB. Seems with every version of IE, it wants more space by default. With broadband connections nowadays, I'm not too worried about caching 64MB of ads.

[iantaylor]

Get a program called:

Fix-It Utilities 4.0

There is a feature within that program where it can clean the system up and it also has some other good features.