Very often, users of personal computers or laptops are faced with a phenomenon such as a PC freeze or incorrect display of sites. The computer behaves strangely: pages open for a long time or instead of the usual pictures, some errors and incomprehensible symbols are displayed. One of the common reasons for this behavior on your PC is that the cache is full and needs to be cleaned.
What is a cache and why clean it
First, let’s figure out what kind of cache is this cache that needs to be cleaned for everything else? And then we will answer the question of how to clean the cache in Opera (this is a specially allocated area on the computer’s hard drive in which copies of previously visited pages of sites are saved).
Have you ever noticed that when you close any page, when you open it again, it loads instantly? True, this is the cache: after visiting once any site on the computer, information about this page remains. This is not quite a history of visits, but it is closely connected with it.
In short: when you get to the site, the server sends to the computer all the information about the requested page, copies of pictures, compressed data about the context, and so on. It is all in the form of small files that remain on the hard drive. The next time you visit this page, the browser first “looks” into the cache, and if it finds the site you are looking for, it simply deploys it from the computer’s memory.
Useful feature that saves time and traffic.
You do not need to send the entire data packet every time, the pages load much faster and traffic is saved, which is very important for users with low Internet speeds.
Why do you need to know how to clean the cache in Opera, and not only in Opera, but in any browser that you use to surf? For example, if the site owner has changed the design or made additions or updates (especially for the browser game), then in this case you will not see the changes, since your browser will expand the page from the cache and all changes will be reflected or incorrectly in the form of red incomprehensible squares and errors, or they don’t appear at all. The cache files themselves are very small, but with an active visit to various sites there are a lot of them, which leads to various kinds of freezes, inhibitions and incorrect display of site pages.
How to clear Opera browser cache
- Click on the menu button in the upper left corner of the browser, select the “History” item in the context menu that opens.
- Next, a new tab with a history of visits will open, look at the upper right corner, there is a button "Clear History" - click on it.
- In the new window that opens, select the period for which you want to clear the history, and click the "Clear browsing history" button.
It is recommended to clear the history "For All Time", while passwords and logins are not deleted, but on frequently visited sites, social. the network will need to be logged in again, if you saved passwords and logins, then you only need to select them from the list of saved ones.
Useful software helps deal with clogged cache
Sometimes the browser cleaning method described above does not quite cope with this non-trivial task. Then the question arises, how to clear the cache on the computer completely so that there are no tails left. Here you can use third-party software, the best of the programs can rightly be called CCleaner.
This is a common free program to clean not only the cache, but also for a whole series of tasks that it copes with.
But here the article is not about the program itself, but about how to clear the cache in Opera. So:
- Run the CCleaner program on your computer.
- We click on the “Analysis” button, depending on the contamination of your computer, the check can be from five seconds to several minutes.
- We are waiting for the analysis to finish, then click on the “Cleanup” button - the program will warn you that the data will be deleted from your computer and ask you to confirm the action, click “OK”.
- If you did not close all browsers and folders during cleaning, the program will ask you to do this, otherwise it will be impossible to perform cleaning in open folders.
Browser cache and cookies - safe cleaning of junk files
By default, the program has already marked items for cleaning browsers and applications. If you pay attention to the column with a list of cleaned sections in the program, you can see that the cleaning will be carried out not only for the cache, sessions, browsing history, but also cookies will be cleared. These items are checked by default, so no additional settings are needed. How to clean the cache and cookies in Opera and other browsers, as well as the application cache data on the computer, without deleting anything extra? The CCleaner utility does an excellent job of this, in addition, the program will empty the trash, which is also important, since a lot of junk files also sometimes accumulate in the trash, which do not affect the system in the best way, since the trash folder is stored on the system disk, and if If it is full, it slows down the PC.
You can download CCleaner on the official website of the developer for free, the program is Russified and easy to manage.
Now you know how to clean the cache in Opera and easily cope with this task. Enjoy your time on the Web, and let small troubles not overshadow your relaxation and distract you from work!