PC cleaning advice please?

[Deleted User]

Hi there,

I would be grateful if someone could give me some advice on how to clean up my registry on my pc.

The pc is a joint marital one which has been in my possession for almost 2 years. It was set up by my ex husband who is an IT tech. Its an old media centre, with accounts for him, me and the children. He has hundreds of files on here and has asked for the pc back. He has offered a replacement, so I am not without, but he wants this machine back, as there is so much of his stuff on it, most of it are photos.

To be honest, it makes no odds to me, I use my laptop and ipad more now, but I do use it on a fairly regular basis for my admin, as its more comfortable for me.

I know how to delete my user account, clear cookies, history etc. But I have no idea how to clean up the registry. My exhusband will know how to recover files/docs etc and undelete anything I may have stored. I have nothing to hide as such, but private letters to friends when I was low and solicitors stuff I could delete, but I do not want him to read.

Knowing him, he will take the pc back, take an image of the hard drive, then wipe it and reinstall it as he wants it. But in my mind I will always feel he has the ability to spy on what I have been doing.

I have nothing dodgy to hide in principle, its merely my privacy and dignity I wish to protect. In fact truth be told there are lots of his files marked private and passworded during our marriage that I can't access. But I guess that is all irrelevant now. I just wish to hand it back knowing my life/thoughts and feelings regarding him remain personal to me.

The o/s is Windows XP if that makes any difference.

Many thanks,
Bailey

closed

backup anything you want to keep to 2 places.

create a new user account (with administrator rights), delete your/kids user accounts (assuming none of the data he or you want is contain within)

turn off system restore on all drives under control panel, system

install ccleaner, tick the wipe free space option, and run it.

install http://www.voidtools.com/ and use it to look for any leftovers, eg *.jpg will find all photo's.

files aren't stored in the registry, but you can use the ccleaner registry scan function to tidy up old references.

waddler_8

As above. There's nothing in the registry that will have an impact on your privacy.

wongataa

There is little point registry cleaning in general. No files are stored there, just software settings, so cleaning it or not will have no effect in your situation.

RumRat

Delete what you want to get rid of. Download and run http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download (Free version).
Run CCleaner then run the built in registry cleaner. (click no when it asks if you want to back anything up, it won't harm anything)
When all done Delete your user account.
At the end of the day it will put your mind at rest which is the most important thing if I read you right.

andydiysaver

depends how good he is - if he's highly skilled he can get deleted files from the hard drive deleted or not, and if he's really good he can do it if you've formatted it because all there processes do (deletion,formatting) is remove the indexing to the file, the file is magnetically stored, the file won't go. if the file was there, there's a chance it can be recovered although the more thoroughly you wipe a drive/space the less change there is. To totally eliminate any chance, esp if you are not sure what you are doing, you want that hard drive in your possession.


I'm an IT guy myself - I'm not being pessimistic I'm being realistic


you can buy a brand new external hard drive which has 1, or 2 terabyte storage in region of £50 or under. Far better plan = get all his files, copy them onto there, give him the drive.


Keep the PC or if he insists, rip out the hard drive , buy another one and give him the PC


depends on 2 factors really- how good he is and how obsessive he is but if he's too much of either I'd recommend the external hard drive idea - it's the current hard drive which contains the information deleted or otherwise


cheers
Andy

closed

wiping free space with ccleaner or full format (vista onwards) will prevent file recovery

[Deleted User]

Thanks for all yr help and advice. Most helpful.

pdunderhill

This is not as easy as it may first appear.

The OP stated that her ex had Images on the Hard disk he wished to save, if the OP is happy that any of herimages are ok for him to see she could run a program like Picassa and copy all images into a new folder and pop them onto a DVD or USB drive.

For absolute security C-Cleaner, in it's basic usage, is notsufficient to prevent a determined person from recovering information from a single pass of deletion.

My advice: try and find out exactly what he would like from the old HDD, if its just images then use Picassa to collect all the images in one place and scour through them to find anything that may affect your privacy and move somewhere else.

As suggested previously buy him a replacement equivalent HHD, (Hard Disk Drive) and pass that onto him. Keep original HDD safe and separate.

Be, and stay, concerned about personal data on old HDDs, short of physical destruction there is always a way, albiet rather pricey, to recover data, I'm doing it right now for an old win 95 HDD, this is your personal and private data and it doesn't sound as if you even want the potential of his letting his curiosity getting the better of him.

So to some up, ask him exactly what he needs, organize it into a new folder and go through it with a fine toothed comb to weed out anything personal to you and copy what you're left with to a DVD/Memory stick etc. Remove and keep original HDD safe, don't worry, if you can use a screwdriver it's a cinch.

Find a new equivalent replacement HDD and pass both on to him.

You keep your data safe, he gets his photos what have you and has a nice new Hard drive.

Piece of cake,

Peter

esuhl

If you delete the files and overwrite them with random data several times (I think this is what the CCleaner "wipe" option does), it would be very hard (and very expensive) to recover any files.

A demonstration in a lab a few years ago showed how the reading/recording head in a hard drive vibrates and does not perfectly align with the circular tracks on the drive. It was shown to be possible to extract some of the original data from the very edges of the track that had not been properly overwritten due to the wobble of the head.

But that really isn't something that even an IT professional could do... unless they had access to a lab and some insanely expensive equipment, or if they sent it away for very expensive analysis.

Delete any private files you have on the PC, then run CCleaner, making sure you tick the option to delete the thumbnail cache, and to wipe free space, along with any other options you might want (e.g. web browser cookies, cache, passwords, etc.).

Don't worry about the registry -- the only things that might have been stored there are the filenames of recently accessed files, and CCleaner should get rid of most of those anyway (without using the registry cleaning option).

Registry cleaners aren't needed in modern versions of Windows (XP onwards), and aren't always intelligent enough to know which entries need to be kept. If you think you have a problem with the registry, it's best to just delete (or modify) the entries that are causing problems and leaving everything else alone.