'Cleaning' a PC???

[Madbury]

OK peeps. Situation is this.

They're upgrading my PC at work today, so I have to give my machine back to be passed on to someone else.

My question is how do I clean off all of the potentially "incriminating" evidence from my PC? i.e. clearing internet history, password files, image caches etc etc. Oh and especially that offensive auto fill in bollocks, that tries to fill in the URL for you. I don't really want it to come up with ntsc-uk, everytime the new user types "www.n" into the URL field.

Help Please!

[SuperBrother]

Which OS are you running?

[Treble]

I'm no expert, but wiping Cookies, Favourites and Temporary Files folders is a start. Change your History options in IE so that old URLs aren't kept, as well.

[Fire]

There are programs to do it all at the touch of the button aren't there? Probably find a few to choose from on www.download.com.

[JRMacumber]

If you're using IE, I'd suggest you go to Internet Options, and the press the "Delete Files" button, the "Clear History" button, go to the Security tab and click on "Auto Complete" button and then click on "Clear Forms" and "Clear Passwords" button. That should clear your cookies, your history, and any form data you might have saved inside IE (address, user names, passwords, etc.). That's a good start.

[Reef]

Go to www.lavasoft.de and download ad-aware

Install and when run, click "Check for updates now" from the front end screen.

Once the updates have installed, click start and this will remove all hidden (and I mean properly hidden, not deleted by standard clearing history means) cookies and what not.

Note, this is to be run once you have done the above suggestions.

Should leave your machine spotless!

[goldbricker]

It's amazing how familiar everyone is at doing this task....

[Ginger Tosser]

if its a nt/2k/xp pc logon as local administrator and delete your profile, then empty trash. However this deletes a lot of stuff, if you plan never to use this pc again do this, some programs installed with your profile credentials may have to be reinstalled for any new user.

[eghamninja]

Which OS are you running?

This is a very good point, because if you are using NT/2000/XP then all this information is tied into your own profile, so the new person would have a seperate profile meaning they won't have access to your internet history (plus you can delete the profile in one go).

[Madbury]

Thanks for the advice all,

The machine is running Win98, so all I've done so far is delete all the crap using IE options and the cookies from the Temporary Internet Files folder.

Think I'll go for a deep clean tomorrow using Adaware.

Cheers

[amorenod]

Don't forget the bookmarks, recent documents and the content of c:\Windows\Temp

Also, you can install Tweak UI, it can delete lots of things under the Paranoia option.

EDIT

To properly delete the cookies, delete the content of c:\windows\cookies.
Search for *.pwl if you entered a password the day you started to work with Windows 98, and delete the results (this password is pointless)

[marcus]

Delete "index.dat" also as this has records of your webbrowsing too.

I take it you dont want to FDISK the drive and reinstall a basic OS, which is probably what I would do if I was that worried about it.

[Ciaran]

You should get Reg Cleaner and delete all the stuff you don't want from the registry, the run an automatic scan and it should delete all the stuff thats deeper in the registry.

Also there are numerous programs (e.g. Evidence elimator) that does everything for you.

[JRMacumber]

Delete "index.dat" also as this has records of your webbrowsing too.

I take it you dont want to FDISK the drive and reinstall a basic OS, which is probably what I would do if I was that worried about it.

I'd be a damn shame if you accidentally dropped an industrial magnet on it. Yep, a real shame.