In my last Blog, we I talked about what the cookies are, and some of the dangers they can be.
Today I am going to talk about how to manage and get rid of cookies from the computer.
First, I will start with regular old cookies. In my opinion, the best tool to manage cookies on your computer is CCleaner. If your computer has been on my bench for repair, you will have it on your desktop.
Crap Cleaner (Ccleaner) is one of the best free cleaner utilities around. I like the Ccleaner SLIM, that is a smaller version without the option of it installing a useless toolbar.
Ccleaner will clean out your temp files where a lot of the crud like malware and viruses like to hide out, and it will clean out Windows and other program temp files that you do not need and just take up disk space.
A really cool feature of Ccleaner is that you can tell it if you want it to keep some cookies. For example, if you go to a weather site every day, it is nice for it to remember you are in 97355 zip code, so you don’t have to enter it every day for the weather report. The cookie keeps that info for you, and it is safe. So you can tell Ccleaner to NOT delete that cookie.
In Ccleaner you click on the Options button, then Cookies. The left window shows cookies that are on the computer, and the right shows the ones you want to keep.
Just click on a cookie to highlight it, then click on the arrow pointing to the right and that will save that cookie. If you don’t want a particular one, just leave it alone, it will be deleted.
The other really nice thing about CCleaner is that it cleans out the dreaded Flash Cookies that I mentioned in the previous blog.
Older versions do not have this feature, so you should update CCleaner if you can.
To see if your version will clean out the Adobe Flash Cookies, click on the cleaner Brush Icon, then Applications. Scroll down and look at the Multimedia section, and make sure Adobe Flash is there, and checked off. I leave all the items here checked off.
There is another way to “manage” the adobe flash cookies, but I don’t like it and think it is cumbersome. You go to the adobe website, and from their website, you run a program that allows you to manage the cookies on your computer, that Adobe allowed on there in the first place.
I just don’t like it at all. To me it is really slimy that Adobe does not put something in the software that you load on the computer to remove those cookies.
But you get what you pay for, and for free, that is what we get, advertising junk. If you are interested in that process, here is a link on how to do it that way.
Warning, as soon as you click on this site, it is looking at your cookies, and displaying them for you to manage.
There are some good things to set in here, including disabling flash cookies completely.
I went into mine and disabled any access, and made sure all disk storage space says NONE. Click on do not allow on the other choices.
Make sure you click on each tab above, and change the settings in each section if you want to turn off those cookies.
If you use FireFox you can use the Better Privacy add-on to help manage the Flash cookies and other privacy settings.
Here is a very good Video that covers pretty much all of the solutions I have mentioned. It is only 5 minutes, but very informative and easy to follow. It does cover the Adobe Website and some of the privacy settings.
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