Windows Vista shipped with Internet Explorer 7, the first version of Internet Explorer to feature tabbed browsing. It is fairly likely that you may not have Internet Explorer version 7 on your computer as Microsoft typically releases new versions of Internet Explorer via Windows Updates. If things arent as documented on this page check to see which version you have by opening IE and clicking on Help then About Internet Explorer. This will tell you what version you have. Internet Explorer 8 is documented in our Windows 7 section.

So what are temporary internet files? When you visit a website or view streaming media etc with your web browser it stores those pages and objects such as images on your hard disk drive in a thing called a cache, which is really just a folder on your computer. When you go to a website Internet Explorer will check to see if youve been there before and if you have it will check to see if the copy of the site in the cache is current. If it is Internet Explorer will load the page from the cache rather than retrieve it from the internet again.

Almost all web browsers have a cache and they are generally good things particularly if your internet connection is slow. Many web browsers do not replace items in the cache however, if you visit a web page and it has changed the browser will write the new page to the cache often without deleting the old one and over a period of time this cache can grow to be quite large, wasting disk space and causing pages to load more slowly as the browser hunts through the cache looking for the most recent copy. In extreme cases web pages may time out while the browser does this. Periodically clearing cached or Temporary Internet Files is certainly a good thing.

To delete your Temporary Internet Files open up Internet Explorer in whatever fashion you usually would and click on tools. If you cant see tools on the top right hand of Internet Explorer press on the left ALT key of your keyboard and an additional menu will appear near your address bar, one of the menu items will be tools. Inside the tools menu you will see Delete Browsing History, click on it.

A new box will appear on your screen titled Delete Browsing History and it will have a number of different buttons that you can use to perform housekeeping on Internet Explorer. Delete Temporary Internet Files is the first button. The other choices include Delete Cookies, Delete History, Delete Forms and Delete Passwords. Click on Delete Files.

When you click on the Delete Files button in the Temporary Internet Files section of the Delete Browsing History Box a dialogue box will pop up prompting Are you sure you want to delete all temporary Internet Explorer files? Click Yes. The process may take several minutes if your Temporary Internet Files cache is large but it will run in the background so at this point you can click close on the bottom of the Delete Browsing History screen and you have successfully deleted your Internet Explorer cache.