What is the best way to get rid of Internet History and files on Windows?

[leglez]

I am needing to clear all the history of my internet and files that I have deleted on windows xp. I have ran CCleaner. Is there anything else good to clear it?

 

[lxskllr]

I think CCleaner, takes care of everything necessary. That won't stop someone dedicated from retrieving files if they really want to though. Someone would need to be tech savy, and committed to go through the trouble of retrieving deleted files. The only way to keep that from happening is to format the drive, and completely write over it a few times.

 

[Oakenfold]

There may be a better way so someone chime in here.
I run this batch file occasionally to overwrite data I've deleted on my hdd.
Cipher command

"cipher /w:C:
cipher /w:C:
exit
"
I believe this was posted on the forums previously, so I do not deserve any credit.


Not sure how this would effect your temp internet history, there may be other ways to retrieve that from within the OS.

 

[lusher]

Originally posted by: lxskllr
I think CCleaner, takes care of everything necessary. That won't stop someone dedicated from retrieving files if they really want to though. Someone would need to be tech savy, and committed to go through the trouble of retrieving deleted files. The only way to keep that from happening is to format the drive, and completely write over it a few times.

Ccleaner should be good enough to prevent even fairly intensive efforts of recovery, as long as you set the options in ccleaner to secure deletion (3 or 7 passes). Ccleaner doesn't offer the widely popular gutmann 35 pass method, but that is considered overkill and "vodoo number" even by Gutmann himself....