By Greg Hewitt-Long
One of the most common ways a piece of malware enters your computer is by exploiting an out-of-date piece of software on your computer – that software can be the operating system itself, Adobe Flash, Acrobat Reader, or Java – to name just a few.
This article will focus reducing the size of your Java cache – and on – updating Java.
We have prepared a step-by-step guide to how to make these changes on a Windows 7 machine – here goes…
First – Open your Control Panel – this is found under the START menu in windows – normally located on the bottom toolbar – look for the Windows icon…
Open your Control Panel - find the Java Icon
Double-click the “Java” icon – to open the Java Control Panel.
Now – you should be on the “General” tab – this is the default tab inside the control panel …
Java Control Panel - General Tab within the settings
Now… change your settings and hit – “Delete” button…
Change cache size to a smaller number - I used 256mb - then click to delete files
Confirm that we really do want to delete the files…
Confirm that you wish to delete these files...
Now we review how often the Java software checks for updates…
Now click the 'Update' tab - we will change how often Java checks for updates
Our preference for Java Updates – is that we want them as soon as they are available – checking for updates ONCE A MONTH is not sufficient – daily checking might be excessive – but that is our preference – we choose daily checks, in the middle of the night (because our PCs are left turned on)…
Change to Daily checks - in the middle of the night...
You are finished! – you now have less Java cache cluttering up your system – and you are checking more frequently for updates in Java (which normally come in response to SECURITY issues with Java) – your security is IMPROVED in less than 3 minutes…