Tiki Bros. Tip Talk: Spring Cleaning In Summertime

Red Tiki: Hey everyone! Welcome to Tiki Bros. Tip Talk…

Wait a second… what do we have here? Green, why on earth are you are wearing elbow length rubber gloves, plastic apron, chemical resistant goggles and what appears to be a gas mask.

Green Tiki: While it may look like I’m getting ready for the apocalypse, in reality I’m just getting ready for some spring cleaning in the hallway bathroom.  Can you hand me that bucket and mop? Oh also that jug of highly caustic cleaner.

Red Tiki: Spring cleaning?! You haven’t cleaned that bathroom in a year, and it does look and smell quite apocalyptic! Also, you should know that is a little late for “spring cleaning”.  We are in the dead of Summer and it is about a hundred-and-five degrees outside!

Green Tiki: Well, it’s never too late for a little spring cleaning! Besides, you know how the bathroom is north facing? It’s totally the coolest place in the house right now. Especially when sit in the cold tub with a wet washcloth on my head.  But, holy smokes – it smells awful in there. Hence the gas-mask and cleaning supplies! Step aside Red!

Red Tiki: Oh you are not getting out of Tiki Bros. Tip Talk that easy, not even to clean the bathroom. Get over here and let’s help some people out with me! Besides your whole getup and “spring cleaning” concept gave me a great idea!

Green Tiki: Fine, I’ll hold my nose and sweat it out. Anyway, this gas mask is cooking my face! So what idea do you have Red?

Red Tiki: Well, you know how we get tons of letters all the time saying various things like: “the games won’t load” or “Ever since your update on Tuesday night something or another is broken!”. Many of these kinds of errors and bugs can be fixed with proper maintenence and cleaning of your computer.  We can call it computer spring cleaning! That has a nice ring to it doesn’t it?

Green Tiki: Ah! That does sound nice, and it makes good sense too. Knowing basic cleaning techniques such as: clearing your browser cache, clearing your Java cache, and dumping your flash cache can be very helpful and easy to learn tools.

Red Tiki: That’s right Green. And if you do some of these tasks often enough, you are less likely to end up with something catastrophic on your hands… like the hallway bathroom! Haha!

Green Tiki: O.K. Red! How about in typical Tiki fashion, we give people the short list, for more tech savvy people, then we break it down for people who may not have done this before?

Red Tiki: Sounds good to me! Lets get started.

If you have not done the following steps in the following order in a while, give it a try!

1. Clear your Flash Cache
2. Clear your Java Cache
3. Sign Out of Pogo
4. Clear your browser’s cache
5. Close your browser.
6. Reboot your computer (This is optional,  you might be amazed at what a fresh restart can do!)

Green Tiki: Wow, that sounds like a lot of steps, but when you break it down, none of the steps are very difficult.

Red Tiki: Exactly Green. So let’s discuss Step 1: Clearing your Flash Cache.

Flash is a software that many Pogo games use and it in many ways is similar Java. All the new Pogo games run on Flash, and many popular older Pogo games have been converted to run on Flash in the last year or two (Poppit! for instance). Similar to Java, it has a cache, or in other words, a place on your computer where it temporarily stores files that are commonly used. The trouble is, sometimes the cache has out of date files on it, and that’s almost like trying to cache in a lottery ticket with an expired date; it just doesn’t work! We have to get rid of these incorrect cache files, so we delete all the cache files.  A cool thing about this, is you can delete these files via a handy website. Go to the Adobe website here and delete your Flash cache files. Just click on the “Delete All Websites” button.

Green Tiki: Well that was easy! I’ll help with the next step since its a bit trickier:  Step 2: Clear Your Java Cache

To clear your Java cache you will need to open your computers control panel.  (Exciting I know!) To do this, click on your “Start” button on your computer (it’s usually on the bottom left side of your screen) then click “Control Panel”. It looks like this:

Inside the control panel you should find an icon named “Java”. Click to open it. If you don’t see a “Java” icon, you may not have Java installed. But more than likely you are in the “Category” view. Click on “View by” and choose “Icons” to show all the control panel icons.  Java should be one of them.

Great now you have the Java control panel open right? The firs tab on the left should be called “General”. Click on “Settings” under “Temporary Internet Files”  and a window should pop up. Click the “Delete Files” button there.  Check both boxes then hit “OK”. If your computer seems to slow down for a minute and nothing happens, don’t worry, that’s normal. You have so many cache files, it just takes a while for them to disappear.  Now that all the Java cache files are deleted, go ahead and close the Java control panel and head to the next step.

Red Tiki: Awesome, another step down! We’re well on our way to a cleaned up system. OK, Step 3: Sign Out of Pogo:

This step is easy as pie. At the top of any Pogo.com page is a button that says “Sign Out”. Click it and your account will be signed out.  Why sign out? Well, Once you’ve signed out of the website, it resets your connection with Pogo. That means, your account will get a fresh chance to reconnect to all of Pogo’s servers and request all the latest files and information about your account once you’ve signed in again.

Green Tiki: Moving on… Step 4. Clearing your Browser Cache:

Just like your Java cache and Flash Caches, there are files that just need to get cleared out. There are different ways to do this in every browser, so here is how you do it in the three browser that Pogo supports:

In IE:

Click on the Gear icon, choose “Internet Options”

Click on the “General Tab” and choose “Delete”

Check the “Temporary Internet files” box, then click “Delete”

In Google Chrome

Click on the Wrench Icon and choose “Settings”, or click here to open the settings screen.

Click “Show Advanced Settings” and click “Clear browsing data”

Check the “Empty the cache” then click “Clear browsing data”

In Firefox:

Click on the Orange Firefox button then click “Options”

Click on the “Privacy” tab and click on “clear your recent history”

Choose “Everything”, then check the “Cache” box only then “Clear Now”

Pretty simple right? Just like clearing your Java cache, it can take a little while for all those old files to clear out.

Red Tiki: Step 5: Close your browser

Why close your browser? Well the simple answer is, clearing your cache occasionally is not totally effective, unless your also restart your browser entirely. That is because the browser has sort of a “virtual” cache that saves files you’ve opened recently. This helps speed up browsing. Close the browser and this cache too, will clear itself up.

Green Tiki: And finally, the last optional step.  Step 6: Reboot Your Computer.

So why reboot your computer? Similar to your browsers cache, your computer also has cache files, and it also caches things in its memory.  If you fully shut down your computer, these for the most part get cleared out as well. You wouldn’t believe how many files your computer accesses once its been running for a while. It can literally be in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Now lets be clear here, if you have a computer, you may “think” that you are shutting it down regularly, but you may actually only be putting it to sleep. Make sure you let your computer go through a complete shut down. To do this in Windows, again, click the “Start” button, but this time press the “Shut Down” button in that menu. Don’t just press the little “moon” button on your computer case or your keyboard, as this will not process a full shut down.

How do you know if your computer fully shut down or not? Well, when your computer turns on, do all the apps and programs and website you were running before you shut down come back up again automatically? Well then, you didn’t actually shut down, you simply slept or hibernated your computer. To really make this step count, it needs go all the way off.

Red Tiki: Now wasn’t that fun? It was not that hard either. At least not as hard of a job Green is going to have cleaning that bathroom! It’s been your turn to clean for about a month! Oh yeah, one more thing. You might notice that your computer runs a bit sluggish after it has rebooted.  It may be this way for the next 5 or so minutes. Just let it alone, or go about your business, it will start to speed up.  The computer is just reopening files, and loading its memory up so that it can run fast. This can take a little while.

Green Tiki: Mumble grumble. Alright, but only because I’m cooking in here and the air conditioning is too expensive to run. Thanks for all the great questions everyone sent in, we will answer more of your questions specifically next time. See you!

Red Tiki: Night all!

Do you have a question you think the Tiki Bros. could answer? Better yet, do you think you could STUMP the Tiki bros with your question? Send the Tiki Bros. an Email and your question could be featured in a future Tiki Bros. Tip Talk!