PLEASE NOTE: If you are running Internet Explorer 6 or 7 as you web browser on XP, please be sure to upgrade to Service Pack 2 for security releases.

Internet Explorer is the most commonly used web browser probably because it comes bundled with the windows operating system, which is also the most commonly used desktop operating system. Most people have preferred ways to work on their computers and want to customize their browser to reflect the way they work. There are several things you can do to customize the features of internet Explorer so it works the way you want it to work. Here are a few of the more common things you can change to make browsing a little more pleasant.

Setting Your Home Page

The home page is the web page that is displayed every time you open a new browser window. You can decide what website you want your browser to display when it opens. To change your default startup page, click Tools->InternetOptions->General. Type the full URL (such as http://www.google.com) to the page you want to set as your home page in the address bar shown below:

Next, click OK. After that, every time you open an internet explorer browser window, the page you set as your default home page will be displayed. When you are surfing, you can return to your home page by clicking on the Home icon (the little house) on the toolbar shown below.

Cleaning Your Cache

Cache (pronounced cash) is a portion of your hard drive reserved to hold the files containing the web pages and their images you access while surfing the web. The storage is designed to be temporary and meant to speed up the surfing process by not requiring you to download all of the images each time you want to view a page. This helps because your browser can load the local copy of the image instead of downloading it again. If you want to know what other users of your computer are viewing on the internet, just check out the browser cache to see what they are looking at.

Since the cache is a reserved area of your hard drive, it can get full and should periodically be deleted otherwise the browser must take time to delete files that have not be accessed in a long time to make room for new files. So, if your browser is running slowly, it is time to do some cleaning and free up some hard drive space for the cache. Periodically clearing the temporary internet files is one way to fix internet explorer when it is running slowly.

After clearing the cache, the browser may take a little longer to load pages with a lot of pictures since it has to download them again. But, if you cleared the cache because it was running slow, you probably won’t notice it.

 

To clear your cache, click Tools->InternetOptions->General. Then go to the bottom of the dialogue box shown above and click on the Clear History button. You can also tell the browser how long it should keep pages in the cache by changing the number of Days to keep pages in history value shown above.

You can also control how much disk space is reserved for your internet explorer cache. If you are short on disk space, you can free up some by reducing the cache. If you surf the web a lot, you can speed things up by making the default size larger. Click Tools->InternetOptions->Settings and the dialogue box shown below will appear. Then change the amount of disk space allocated.

Change Text Size

If you need to make the text larger for easier reading or smaller because you have excellent eyesight, click View->TextSize on the menu shown below and select a larger or smaller size.

To adjust the color or style of fonts, click Tools->InternetOptions and click the Accessibility button. The dialogue box below will appear. Choose whatever options you prefer then click OK.

 

Customize the Favorites Menu

Most people quickly learn that they can bookmark their favorite web sites by adding them to the favorites list. You can also organize into folders to make finding things easier. Click Favorites-> Organize Favorites as shown below.

The dialogue box shown below will appear.

You can create folders and/or move them around. Then move your links to the appropriate folders. I find this makes finding a specific web page I am looking for much easier since I have hundreds of web pages bookmarked.

You can also organize your favorites by using Windows Explorer under c:\Documents and Settings\username\Favorites. This is the folder that Windows stores the links to your favorites. Most of the time it is easier to make changes here than using the dialogue boxes in internet explorer.