Sometimes while browsing the internet people say that their browser is unable to view certain web pages. The “Page Not Available” error may show up or the page may show outdated information. A major reason, at times, for this is due to the browser cache. How the cache works is that your web browser stores (or ‘caches’) web pages on your hard drive and in memory to make the sites that you commonly visit load faster. One naturally assumes that the information being seen on the monitor is up-to-date and live, but when you click on a link from the site it is quite possible that what you see come up is only a cached version of the page when you last visited that particular website. In some cases, you would get an error message that the requested location or file or page cannot be found because the location may have been changed since your last visit.

When a situation like that occurs, you will need to clear your cache and refresh the page, even closing and then re-opening the browser. It would also help if you keep the disk space used for caching very low. Here is how to clear the cache and adjust the disk space used:

Internet Explorer:

1. Click on Tools then Internet Options.
2. Click Delete Files (Temporary Internet Files) to clear the cache.
3. To change the cache settings, click the Settings button within Internet Options.
4. Change Check for Newer Versions of Stored Pages to Every visit to the page.
5. You can change the setting for disk space to something smaller (like between 1 and 15 Mb).

Firefox:

1. Click on Tools then Options.
2. Click on the Advanced tab at the top then select the Network tab.
3. Under the section with the heading Cache, click Clear Now.
4. If you want to adjust the disk space used to store the cache, simply change the number you see in the box to a lower value.

Netscape:

1. Click Edit and then Preferences.
2. Click on Advanced and then Cache.
3. Click on the Clear Memory Cache and Clear Disk Cache buttons.
3. To adjust the cache settings, change Compare the page in the cache to the page on the network (bottom of the same window) to Every time I view the page.
4. You may optionally change the Memory and Disk Cache settings to something smaller (like between 4096 and 10240 Kb).

The reason why it makes sense to lower the cache disk space is that the higher the value is, the larger the hard drive space that is needed to store hundreds of images and html files for every web page that you’ve visited since the last time you cleaned your cache. It also lessens the time taken to clean up the cache. It is therefore important that you clear your cache regularly, like every week for instance, to prevent old information from being loaded when you visit previously visited websites.