need help with computer

[bugspray11]

hey guys

i use my computer alot for buisness so alot of personel info gets stored in it from what i hear even when i clean my history and cookies and so on that stuff still stays inhear and in the right hands could affect me badly is there any software to erase that or can it be done manually and where is this info going is it in the index.dat file..???

 

[WhatsMyUserName]

i dont know about index.dat, but there is traces of everything you deleted all over your drive. there are a lot of "file shredders" on the net for download.these remove all trace of it on your drive, by overwriting it several times then deleting it, then removing all traces of it from the registry. but beware because some of these just delete it normally, after sending it to a malicious user(hacker).and when something is deleted(not put in recycle bin)it doesnt get stored anywhere,it gets "wiped from the drive".(hard drives store information on a very thin disk inside the casing, and on that disk are billions upon billions of tiny magnetic "grains", that are arranged in a specific order so that your hard drive can read it as bits and bytes).when something is deleted these "grains" are "wiped" away.but 9 times out of 10 there are traces left on there, and from these you can reconstruct part of that info. hope that helps, i know i rambled on but i have a certain passion for computers lol.

 

[Gshift]

CCleaner is a good freeware program that will delete and rewrite the data over several times. You will need to set it to that setting but it works good. I would suggest running it once a week if you let it sit to long without regular cleans it takes longer.

 

[berry120]

If you're worried about that sort of thing, you might want to switch to using a portable browser instead of the one on your computer - you can load something like portable firefox onto a pendrive and use that as you would a normal browser, but nothing gets left on the actual computer so there's no trace left Unless of course that it's being monitored from the other end and logged, but there's nothing you can do about that anyway!

 

[n0gear1]

Encrypt your whole drive with truecrypt.
http://www.truecrypt.org/