How do i stop this ?

paul2468

Hi, i am getting a new p.c soon and i am going to sell my old one, when i fill forms in online after i have typed the first letter in it will come up with the rest of my address or what ever, also when i go on google after the first letter it will come up with all i have been looking for on that letter, how can i stop this before i sell my p.c. as from a security point of view it is not very clever.

Darksun

If you're going to be selling the computer, format the harddrive and reinstall the operating system. This is probably the quickest way of deleting everything.

It probably won't matter, but you may want to look into a more secure method of deleting stuff, since normally a format can be reversed by someone competent enough. http://dban.sourceforge.net/ is a good way to easily wipe all data off the harddisk to military approved security standards.

sco0ter

Open Internet explorer and go to the tools/internet options. Inoptions select content and then autocomplete. You can delete your history from here and even disable it.

Hope this helped

penrhyn

Consider removing the harddrive from you old PC and using it as a second drive on your new one.

In my view the best way of removing sensitive data from a harddrive is to use a hammer.

Darksun

penrhyn wrote:

In my view the best way of removing sensitive data from a harddrive is to use a hammer.

You've obviously never heard some of the cases OnTrack have had to deal with, check out http://www.ontrack.com/newsreleases/index.asp?getPressRelease=31935

If you want to be REALLY secure, use military grade formatting, dismantle the drive and use a high powered bulk eraser and then burn the drive with thermite - good look recovering the data off THAT.

meep_2

personally i would do a different approach.

Data can be retrived from the disk surface by using a hex editor like winHex etc, but you have to know what your doing, and the data can't be overwritten on the surface. Firstly I would run something like CCleaner to remove everything internet related like passwords and details on the computer, and any other crap, secondly I'd go through and uninstall everything that I didn't want, need, or sell on, then I'd defrag the disk, which basically moves information around it, covering the old stuff you've deleted with data left on the computer, you may then decide that if you want to go a step further, u format the disk with an app that sets all the disk surface data bits to 0 (normally format etc will just kill the boot table), then reinstall the operating system back over the top.

A bit convoluted, and its not a government computer, but if you want to make sure then its a fairly good way without smashing it with a hammer.

HairyHatMan

Personally, I'd follow meeps advice, but before you defrag, run eraser to erase unused space, than run it again after you've defragged.