Unexpected downloads
 

I was astounded to find that some of the pictures I have looked at--and only looked at--were downloaded on my computer. They were from the threads on this board. I didn't even print them. How could this happen?

your computer keeps a folder called the "cache" - also called "temporary internet files." the reason it does this is for faster web-surfing. every website you surf to is full of images, text, and html coding, and all of this is downloaded by your machine in order to view the website. instead of downloading the full website every time you visit it, the computer stores the website's contents in the cache and compares those contents to the server. if the contents are the same, shazaam, the website will pop right up because there's no downloading to do. if there are differences, the computer will download the content that is different and then display it. this is all done in the name of faster websurfing. it is infinitely faster to call up content from your hard drive than download it from a webserver.

Many new "high-speed" dial-up providers will use this method as well, basically increasing the cache size and using proprietary software to do it. In theory, it's a great idea, but can eat up HDD space and leave unwanted remnants as well. If you are using one of these, you may want to disable it when you are visiting sites whose content you don't want on your machine.

Yep. You can clear it out if you like, and in some browsers, I believe you can set it to not even use a cache at all--but thats generally not a good idea.