Does Deleting the Cache Speed Up Your PC?

Well, we’ve been dealing such questions ourselves for quite some time now. With the latest smartphones lying around and having the option of ‘clear cached data’ people have started to develop this tendency to think the same for their PCs also.
deleting pc cache
Many times when you go to a person with a few tech skills for say, regarding your slow PC, they start jabbering about running some tune up tools to clear the cache and all stuff. The question is, does it matters? Does Deleting the Cache Speed Up Your PC? Or is it just a myth? Well, yes and no! There are scenarios where the answer varies, let us discover more about the issue itself.

People think that the cached files and data are left there for no use and somehow eating a lot on their disks or even some thinks that the cached data just sits there and wait till your PC becomes sluggish. This is completely untrue. The cached data is meant for keeping some files downloaded temporarily so that whenever you try to visit some pages on your browser, it won’t need to re-download all the files again. This all saves you time, internet bandwidth and even spares you from unnecessary frustration from even slower rates of loading pages.

Why caching is preferred for certain applications?


PC caching

The major problem arises when an application or sets of applications wants to generate a set of info that usually takes a while to load every time the application is started again. Instead of performing the initialization at every runtime, it caches some of the data which is going to remain constant at every run. When you are wiping the cache you are deleting those files, and the application has to start over, once you run the application again. And THIS WILL SLOW YOUR PC DOWN!

So, where is it all going?

PC keyboard and RAM

Let’s talk regarding latency. Suppose if a single image file is taking up 2 seconds to load from a web server, which is fine. But modern day web pages doesn’t just contain one such image; it is a collection of tonnes of such small images. And apart from images, there are some more data that is needed to be downloaded, most of which don’t change every day. Now suppose you are clearing your cached data after every session.

Now think of how many such similar websites you visit in a day and don’t forget to count the number of visits and re-visits you pay to the same website. Now, calculate the time which is going to be lost in downloading all the stuff back AGAIN, and yeah! TIME! If it all that matters to you.

So, it is pretty much a bad idea to clean the cache after every interval. Surely, you can delete and module the cached data after a period of days or months to make sure everything is running perfectly. But it is quite sure that clearing the cached data that is cleared too often isn’t going to make your PC fast, at all.

Where all it is okay to clear the cached data?



Well, exceptions to the rules mentioned above are always there. In scenarios like where you are limited with certain resources like less hard disk space available, available RAM memory is too less, or even faulty RAMs, probably cached corruption and even remove the useless autocomplete data.

Limited disk space and slow disk drives


PC disk drives

For all those trying to free some space on their hard drives can go ahead with the deletion of the cache. Just keep in mind that the deleted cached data will be restored back once you open those sets of websites or do the similar tasks that you did before its deletion.

Corruption of cached data

In cases when the cached data becomes out of date or when the cached data become corrupted because of some reason, the application can’t get rid of it automatically. So, in that case, you need to delete it to make the application work smoothly manually.

Final words

Deleting the cache is something you might want to consider if you are worried about your privacy apart from the factors mentioned above. It is still a topic as many of the tech experts consider ‘deleting the cache and gaining speed’ as a myth.

Author Bio:
Sejal Parmar is an Android Geek and she loves exploring apps. She blogs about Android Apps & Games at NoxAppPlayer.com.

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