Clean Up After Yourself

This week I am reflecting on an assignment I had for my network security class. I had a choice of four tasks and I chose to find my cookies in Google's Chrome browser. This was a task that seemed easy enough.

I used Windows Explorer to navigate to the Chrome program folder. I did not find the cookies there. I then navigated to my users file and looked in the Chrome folder there. Nope. I even looked in the Temp files and nothing looked familiar.

I took several online classes while I was in the Air Force because I wanted to be able to use Microsoft Office more efficiently. One of  the first things that is taught is the Help menu. This practice has avoided hours of frustration when I wanted to learn how to do something new. Coming back to the present, I decided to use the Help menu that is in most applications.

I invoked the Chrome browser menu which is the three dots stacked on top of one another and lives next to the plug-ins and address bar on the right hand side of the screen. I typed in the word "cookies" and I was directed to this section:

Using these directions, I was able to view the cookies on my computer. I knew there were a lot of them. I selected three of them and used them to perform my experiments and answer the question in the forum.

I picked the second one down from the top in the picture above because it contained three different cookies. This seemed interesting to me and I clicked on the sideways arrow on the right and expanded the section.

Now I know the file names of the cookies associated with this website. I clicked on the downward arrow and expanded the contents.

This was the data that was provided by that one cookie. Notice the date it was created and the date it expires. I don't know why this needs to live for 10 years. Many, many things can change in 10 years.

In my answers to the questions, I talked about CCleaner. This is one of my favorite non-system utilities and can be downloaded for free. The functionality is mostly there but it requires a lot of manual input and operation. The automated side is very limited but it works for what I need it for.

With this application, I can free up some disk space and even clean the registry up. You can do all of this in Windows as well but the tools are not all together like they are here. This provides a more streamlined approach to cleaning up disk space and removing cookies.

The Disk Clean Up utility in Windows is another option. Using Windows Explorer, navigate to the C: drive and right click on the icon. Then select properties. Press the Disk Cleanup button in the middle of the window. The next window looks like this:

Based on this, I recover 62.7 MB. Now let's look at a CCleaner analysis:

CCleaner indicates that it can recover over 4,000 MB. To me, this is more efficient than going to each application and clearing the cache.

Either of these methods can help you remove cookies from your computer. There may be more applications out there to do this. I have used CCleaner for many years and prefer it over the Windows utility.