Clearing Cache Files to Boost your Performance
A few basic moves for your digital device to give it a little more 'pep'.
Digital devices often collect frequently-used files in spaces called “caches” (cash-es). Although originally designed to accelerate the device’s performance by preventing extra trips to the persistent storage area for common materials, these caches can fill up, which can cause exactly the opposite effect - a degradation in performance due to too much time being spent searching through them. When dealing with spinning-disk PCs, that really became untenable. Clearing out your cache can lead to significant performance gains as it frees up your CPU to do what it does best - computing. Here’s how for some common devices.
Windows
If you have a Windows 10 or 11 PC, occasional cleaning of cached files can make a significant difference in performance levels. If you haven't cleared your cache in a while, there's a high likelihood that you're carrying around a lot of "dead weight". Here's how to shed the excess that you don't need:
Navigate to Settings (the gear icon in the start menu) > System > Storage, and you'll see a chart indicating distribution of files that are not necessary.
Some of these areas, such as "Apps & Features", won't be changeable since they are managed by the company. Temporary files, on the other hand, can be emptied.
You can also turn on "Storage Sense" which has various time limits that you can impose on temp files, so you don't have to spend time thinking about them. They will just be removed after the time limit you establish.
Android
On an Android phone (and to a lesser extent, Android smart TVs), open the settings app. Scroll to "Storage", and look for the "Apps" option. Later versions of the OS enable you to jump straight to Apps.
Within each app there will be a section for "storage" and within that there should be an option to "Clear Cache". You can also clear the data on some of them, but this is usually information that is useful to you and may need to be re-downloaded, possibly costing you some of your daily limit.
Also - in the "Chrome" app, select the triple-dot menu at the top right, choose "History" and clear your browsing data. There will also be options there for clearing cached images, cookies, etc. You may also want to confirm that you've closed all unneeded tabs.
Here are some other methods of accelerating your Android performance, but they're slightly more advanced, so beyond the scope of this.
iPhone
Open the "settings" app on your iPhone (or go directly through the Safari app). Find Safari and enter that. Scroll through the Safari options until you find "Clear History and Website Data". Tap that to blow out Safari's cache.
To clear Chrome data, select the triple-dot menu, and you should see "Delete Browsing Data" directly. Tap that. It will ask for a "how long back" to keep. Select whatever works for you. It will also ask which parts of the browsing data you want to get rid of. Again, that's your call.
To delete application caches, iPhones are a bit more finicky and don't really have a standard, so you might have to go through each app individually to find how to clean it up. Alternatively, you can uninstall and re-install the app to blow it completely away and start fresh.
Hopefully, this will help 'speed up' your various devices, and maybe breathe some more lifetime into the ones that have begun to give you the "sluggishness" frustration :).