Many people have heard the term "cookie" in relation to the Internet and think they are part of some big nefarious plot companies are using to steal personal information. Although some nasty hacker has probably figured out how to use cookies maliciously, in general cookies are innocuous, boring text files. In most cases, the way Web sites get personal information is by tricking you into typing it in yourself, not using cookies.
A cookie is actually a small text file that is placed on your hard disk by a Web site. Often you actually ask to have it. For example, any time you tell a shopping site to "remember your address" or your log-in information, it's being stored in a cookie on your hard disk. Some sites use temporary cookies that disappear when you close the browser to keep track of things like the items that have been added to your shopping cart. Other sites use cookies to "remember" your preferences as you navigate a site.
The bottom line is that computers are dumb. So programmers have to use cookies to store information to keep track of stuff as you surf around. The result is more dynamic Web sites, but also a lot of cookies stored on your hard disk over time. Cookies are little tiny files, but if you have a lot of them, they could be occupying some space that might be better used for something else.
If you want to delete all the cookies on your hard disk, you can do it in Internet Explorer. Choose Tools | Options and click Delete Cookies. If you use a different browser, or just like to look at cookies before you delete them, you also can delete them like any other file using Windows Explorer.
In fact, rather than dumping all the cookies, you may find that some are worth keeping. For example, if you log into a particular site a lot, you may want to keep the cookie that remembers your log in information. To check out your cookies in Windows XP, navigate to C:\Documents and Settings. Under your log in name, you'll see a folder called Cookies. (In earlier versions, the folder was called Temporary Internet Files.) You can tell what site the cookie came from by scanning the name. You can even look at them in Notepad, although they aren't very interesting reading.
Like a lot of things, once you have glimpsed a cookie, you'll find it's not really scary after all. And with one press of the Delete key, it's gone.
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