Of course when you use a computer for a long time, you feel that your computer has become sluggish, which sometimes makes you have to restart your computer so that you can continue your work without “Problem”.
Windows, like all operating systems, uses various types of cache memory to speed up data transfers. The saturation of one or more of these memory spaces can cause a marked decrease in the performance of the computer or / and connectivity problems. This article will teach you how to clean up the caches that store DNS data, thumbnail images, and items used by the web browser so that Windows can run as efficiently as possible.
How to clean up caches in Windows?
Clean cache memory via a shortcut
Create a shortcut. When you use your computer for hours on end, unnecessarily open processes tend to take up more and more space in RAM, which can end up slowing down your machine significantly. A shortcut pointing to Windows RAM Cleaner is one of the most convenient ways to neutralize these processes, as it allows you to start cleaning with one click as soon as your computer starts to slow down.
- Right click on the Windows desktop then select “New” and “Shortcut”.
Type the path of the program to target. In the text field of the “Create shortcut” window, type one of the following two lines depending on your version of Windows (32 or 64 bit?):
- for the 32-bit version, type % windir% system32 rundll32.exe advapi32.dll, ProcessIdleTasks
- for the 64-bit version, type % windir% SysWOW64 rundll32.exe advapi32.dll, ProcessIdleTasks
Give the shortcut a name. After pressing the “Next” button, you can give the shortcut any name you like.
- Once done, press the “Finish” button.
Open the shortcut. As soon as the shortcut appears on the Windows desktop, you can use it to launch the RAM memory cleaning program. All you have to do is right click on it and click on the “Open” option at the top of the context menu.
- The cleaning program examines the running processes and closes those that correspond to software that you are no longer using, in order to free up RAM memory.
Clean the DNS cache
Open Command Prompt. You may experience connection issues when the Windows DNS cache is corrupted or out of date. Most of these issues should be resolved when you clean up this cache.
- Click the “Start” button (left in the taskbar, bottom of the desktop screen, by default), then type “cmd” in the search text.
- Right click on “cmd.exe” at the top of the window, then click on “Run as administrator”. You must give the program administrator rights before launching it, because it will erase the content of a file (used as a DNS cache) which is in the system folder.
Type the command to clean the DNS cache. To clean the DNS cache, type ipconfig / flushdns and press the key ⌅ Enter.
- If you entered the command correctly and everything went well, you might read the message “Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache”. Then close the Command Prompt.
Erase Thumbnails With Windows Cleaner
Open the Disk Cleanup program. This system tool is installed by default in Windows. It clears outdated files and temporary data stored on your machine’s hard drive (s), but it also clears the cache containing thumbnails – a thumbnail being a smaller version of a image that appears when you use Windows Disk Explorer. When you use this Windows program to erase thumbnails, you can select precisely the disk you want to clean.
- Click on the “Start” button and then on “Computer”, then right click on the disk of your choice and on “Properties”. In the window that opens, click on the “Disk Cleanup” button. You must wait while a small window shows the progress of calculating the total size of the space that can be freed by cleaning.
- The thumbnail cache contains all of the thumbnails that appear in folders when you explore your hard drive. If your disk contains a lot of image and video files, this cache can be several hundred MB in size.
Check the “Thumbnails” box. In the “Disk Cleanup for (X:)” window, use the vertical scroll bar if necessary to locate the box corresponding to “Thumbnails”.
- To the far right of the line corresponding to the “Thumbnails” box, you can read the amount of memory that will be freed after cleaning the thumbnails. As soon as you have checked the box “Miniatures”, the total space saved increases by this amount.
- You can also check the boxes for error report files and temporary files to free up even more space.
Start cleaning the cache. After having selected the files you want to delete, including the thumbnails, click on the “OK” button to validate your choice and on the “Delete files” button to start the cleaning process.
- Here ! You have erased unnecessary files and freed up disk space for a more efficient machine.
Repeat this operation regularly. The amount of space taken up by thumbnails and temporary files is growing rapidly and that is why you need to delete these files frequently so that they do not take up too much disk space. Perform this cleaning at least once a month to preserve the performance of your computer.
Clean web browser caches
Clean the Google Chrome cache. Click the (☰) button in the upper right corner, then click “Settings” to open the settings page.
- At the bottom of the page, click on the “Show advanced settings” link.
- Locate the “Confidentiality” section and click on the “Clear browsing data…” button. You can also reach this window at any time by pressing the key combination ^ Ctrl +⇧ Shift +⌦ Of the.
- Make sure the “Cached images and files” box is checked, then click the “Clear browsing data” button.
Clean the Internet Explorer cache. Click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of the Internet Explorer window, then click on “Security” and “Delete browsing history.” You can also press the key combination ^ Ctrl +⇧ Shift +⌦ Del to open this window.
- Check the box next to “Temporary Internet files and website files”. Make sure you uncheck all of the boxes that correspond to data you want to keep.
- Click on the “Remove” button.
Clean the Firefox cache. Click on the (☰) button in the upper right corner, then on “History” and “Clear recent history…”. You can also press the key combination ^ Ctrl +⇧ Shift +⌦ Del to open this window.
- Expand the “Details” section, if necessary, then check the “Cache” box.
- At the top of the window, set “Interval to Clear” to “All”.
- Click the “Erase Now” button.
Source: Wikihow
