The ITSD Help Desk occasionally receives calls from computer users whose Web browsers aren’t operating at their peak performance. One thing you can do to help improve browser performance is to periodically clean out the “cookies” and temporary files that accumulate when you visit Web sites. The cookies and files reside either in your computer’s memory or on the disk, and allow you to quickly recall a recently visited site. But, they can add up and impair performance, so clearing them out is a good idea. Here’s how, depending on your browser:

Netscape Navigator: Pull down the Edit menu, click on Preferences, then Advanced and then Cache. You can then click on both Clear memory cache and Clear disk cache.

Internet Explorer: Pull down the Tools menu, open Internet Options, and on the General tab click on Delete Cookies and Delete Files.

Mozilla: Pull down Tools and open Cookie Manager. Click on Manage Stored Cookies, then on Remove all cookies. To clean out the cache file, pull down the Edit menu, click on Preferences, then open the Advanced category on the left side and click on Cache. From there, click on the Clear Cache button.