Good grief, Tony 1983- I did not mean to imply that you were doing anything illegal!
I should have been more clear in my remarks. The Windows files that these programs "clean up" are not necessarily bad. Some, whether they fetch requested data faster or offer you a quick choice on a menu, are actually quite convenient. I use "auto complete", for example. I type a letter or two, and Windows figures out what I might want to do and lets me choose. Temp internet files can actually speed surfing. Some cookies save me the aggravation of "logging in", like on this site. Clearing all the above files will not necessarily improve the performance of your computer. Maybe back in the old days of small harddrives and slow processors, clearing these files had advantages. Today's modern computer can handle the clutter.
There are some situations that a person might want/need to erase tracks. I'm thinking of the business person plugging into a hotel network, an employee with a boss bent on vengeance, a teenager who wants privacy from siblings who share the computer, and so on. You can use ccleaner or any other software, including Windows itself to "hide" or delete your files, but if a tech like me wants to see them, they are still there. Any files you delete are there until you overwrite them, sometimes up to seven times, I'm told. My point with the hammer was that there is no way to "be sure" they are gone without physically destroying the drive. Casual clean up doesn't need to be as extreme as that list, on today's computers, and may, in fact, have a counter productive performance effect. Every clean up on that list, by the way, can be performed within XP by the user.
What my point is (did you think I would ever get there?) is that what you should do, or need to do, depends on how YOU use your computer. For most of us, that kind of extreme clean up is not needed, and could be a nuisance.
Here is an example: When I log off from my bank account, the website gives me a stern warning to clear my brower's cache to protect my privacy. First of all, no one uses my computer but me. Second, I have "Do not save encrypted pages to disk" ticked, so there is nothing to delete regarding my account anyway. If I cleared my browser, it would make the pages load more slowly on the sites I regularly visit, the next time. So, knowing that I am not risking anything (no one cares about my $38.56!) I ignore the warning and move on.
In your very first post you said that everything was working fine and that you had no problems. Why create some? Unless you (or whoever is reading this) has special privacy concerns, here are some good tips:
Internet Options>Tools> General> Settings
put that slider below 80 MB and don't worry about it.
If you want to delete individual URLs from the address bar, just highlight them and press delete. Once a month or so, clean out your temp files and any cookies you don't use. If auto complete is bugging you, shut it off. "History" is a matter of personal preference. I keep lots of mine because I often go back looking for what I know I was looking at. If you don't, set it to clear at browser close, or set it for just a few days.
For more privacy, set up a different user account for other people using the computer, and make sure you aren't "sharing" files you don't want to. Set Windows folders to hidden, and that will keep less experienced people out of there.
Hope this helps clarify things some.
Johanna
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