Erasing cache files?

W

Wolfblass

New Member
Hi all
I'm new here, so sorry if this post is in the wrong section.
I'm/was thinking of selling my p.c. That was until someone told me about Google Desktop, that can search through your harddrive, and recover all kinds of personal info, even though you thought you had erased them. I'm talking about e-mails, pictures, web-sites - i do on-line banking!!!
I tried it myself, and sure enough, lots of info was available, pictures, music that i've listened to, old web pages, i thought i'd cleared them by using delete browsing history from Internet Explorer.
Anyway, how do i erase these from my harddrive so i can sell the p.c.?

Many thanks.
 
You really can't. A full format (not quick) will erase everything good enough, if you are really worried about it you can 0 out the drive but IMO that's overkill and things can still be recovered if someone really really wanted to.
 
You can search for programs that wipe your hard drive free space, which will make it unreadable by common data-restoration programs available to most users. These are also known as shredders which use 0's or random patterns to overwirte deleted data. Whatever tool you use, the more passes you allow, the more it overwrites your data.

I use PGP which contains a wiping tool, but you probably wont want to install an encrpyrion program to do this.


So, google this:
wipe free hdd space

find a program you like, then re-run google desktop to be sure.
 
Cheers for the replies, will do as suggested, i can't understand why google made such a powerfull tool available, i know there are others out there, but this is a free 5 second d/lL !

Thanks again.
 
Why wouldnt they make it available it saves so much time, and is pretty easily fixed as you see..

Kent.
 
XRT said:
Why wouldnt they make it available it saves so much time, and is pretty easily fixed as you see..

Kent.
Click to expand...

I agree that it is easy to fix, it's just that i think they should have incuded an option to let you delete these permanantly, well as far as Google Desktop is concerned, i know there are other programmes out there that can recover pc history, we need these to catch paediphiles and the like.
 
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