14 DAY TRIAL // The more you browse the Web the more you are prone to the risk of infecting your computer and creating a huge chunk of temporary files or junk files. Although it may not seem like your computer's disk space is getting shorter and shorter, a small system drive may become saturated with web files up to the point of creating performance problems to your computer.
If you take a look in Windows Temporary Internet Files, you will be amazed at how much junk is collected in one web browsing session. All sorts of images composing advertisements, CSS, JavaScripts and HTML leftovers clutter in the temporary folder. This - in some cases almost endless - pile of junk used to be an important location for myriads of users that needed to get their hands on flash movies that could not be downloaded directly from the visited website.
To make your navigation smoother, websites appeal to cookies, little text files swapped between servers and web browsers for authentication, tracking and maintaining specific information about users (usernames and passwords, contents of shopping carts etc.). These have a set period of life according to what they are intended for.
Cookies are to "blame" for you not having to type in your login details when closing webmail sites or a forum of some sort as they are a message given by the web browser to a web server requesting certain pages from the server. However, apart from the benefits cookies bring to any computer user, they have their dark side as well and can be used for tracking the users' browsing habits or sending login details to remote third party computers.
Their life expectancy is generally short for security reasons (they are an important target of computer attacks). But don't expect Windows or Internet Explorer (or any other web browser for that matter) to automatically wipe them out as this will not happen. The result is you being left with a bunch of useless files that do nothing but eat up disk space (fortunately not too much) and contribute to general file fragmentation level on your computer.
With Internet Explorer, the most you can do is delete them all with not selection whatsoever. Other software will let you choose which ones to save from elimination and preserve them for further use. But most users cannot make a difference and would rather wipe them all out.
Luckily, there is an automatic way to clean your computer of expired cookies and keep only those messages that are still alive and kicking. Expired Cookies Cleaner is a free solution in this sense and, may I add, a very good one. You have to know though that this utility addresses IE users as many other browsers do not need it.
Expired Cookies Cleaner comes archived in a less than 30KB file and does not require installation. Simply unzip the file and launch it. Also, do not expect any sort of settings or options as the application brings only two buttons with it.
After the interface is loaded, all you have to do is hit the "Process" button for the program to start scanning. Soon after this action, you will be provided with the results. During our testing, the software returned the results in less than 10 seconds (but there was little to clean). However, cleaning time depends entirely on the amount of data to be screened (reports say that it cleaned 2500 cookies in 24 seconds).
The data presented in the window presents all detected files containing cookies, as well as a report on the situation. You are provided with the total number of cookies detected, how many cookies are expired, the number of files removed and how many have been optimized (stripped by expired cookies). The last info available shows the amount of time required by the entire operation.
Expired Cookies Cleaner job is swift, but there is no say on what it does and how it does it. Users do not get to make any setting, not even input search parameters to help the app detect the right cookies.
For those which are allergic to user interfaces, you should know that you can run it with command line parameter "a" ("C:>ExpiredCookiesCleaner.exe a filename"). If the name of the report is not defined, then it will automatically save it as Result.log. It works the same, regardless of whether you are using the GUI or command line.
The conclusion for the application is that it is extremely fast in finishing the job. Users don't have a chance to make any settings and the process is completely automatic.
The Good
Extremely easy to use, Expired Cookies Cleaner does not require and configuration from the user. Cleaning operation is supersonic fast.
The Bad
There is no indication as to its ways of detecting the cookies and optimizing the files. The only options you have are "Process" and "Exit".
The Truth
I wish the application were a bit more complex and allowed users to select which cookies to be deleted, besides the expired ones. This way, users could also get rid of eventual rotten cookies tracking their browsing preferences.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
