Daddy Bob

DADDY BOB'S COMPUTER Q & A

 

July 18, 2010

Q. For some reason, it is taking longer and longer for my Internet Explorer to open. Also, it appears that outlook Express is also taking longer. How can I speed these up?

A. There are several things that can slow the opening of Internet Explorer (IE) and one of them will also affect Outlook Express (OE). This is the Auto Complete feature that is turned on by default when Windows is installed.

AutoComplete tries to predict a word or phrase that the user wants to type in without the user actually typing it in completely. Most of the time this can be helpful and speed things up. BUT.... When the computer has a very large list of things to compare it can actually slow things down too. After the browser or email program has been used for a while, this list of AutoComplete possibilities can get so large that it takes much longer to go through it than it would to type in the information. Sometimes too much help can be a hindrance.

Since this list must be loaded in before IE or OE can start, the startup can be delayed. Personally, I don't find the AutoComplete feature to be that helpful and usually turn all or part of it off.

Click Start, then Control Panel, select Internet Options and then click the Content tab. In the AutoComplete section, click on the Settings button. This dialog will display. This is from Windows 7, but other OS will be similar.

Here you can choose what to use AutoComplete for. As you can see, I have them all turned off but you can make your own selections. In any case, you will want to click the Delete AutoComplete history... button. This will display.

Here you can choose what to delete. About the only thing you may not want to delete is the passwords if you use them but have no idea what they may be. Strangely enough, many people create passwords for a variety of reasons, and then promptly forget what they are. For sure, delete the Temporary Internet Files.

Another reason for slow opening of IE, are these Temporary Internet Files. When everyone used dial up, the URLs to all websites that you visited were saved in a folder called Temporary Internet Files. The purpose of this was so that if you went to a previous site, the computer would look in this folder and if it found the site it used that information. This made the page load faster.

However with the advent of broadband connections, this going over the list of previous sites takes longer than actually going to the site itself. Temporary Internet Files have become redundant and no longer viable. But, IE will still cache these URLs and try to use them unless you set your Internet Options differently from the default.

To stop caching the URLs, open the Control Panel and Internet Options. Click the Advanced tab and scroll down to the Security section. Check the box in front of, "Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed". Click OK.

One other possibly contributor to a slow start up of IE could be with the Add-ons. Click HERE to read more about Ad-ons and how to modify them.

Click HERE to view or download as a Microsoft Word document

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