Ran Recuva and noticed that every newspaper photo, including their ads showed up during a scan of my "C" drive. I read online newspapers every morning, but had no idea they were attaching junk that would "adhere" to my hd.

Am I to understand that these photos/ads are imbedded forever after I view them? Is there any way to prevent this? Surely, all this junk is taking up good usable memory space.

OK...I admit I'm technically challenged but had good luck so far since I bought my pc in 2006 with only a couple minor glitches; I'm aware of "cookies", add ons and pop-up ads certainly, but didn't know everything I ever scanned online stays on my pc, even stuff I don't recall having looked at, i.e., auto ads, real estate promos, entertainers and celebrities, photos of politicians, and people's photos that I don't have a clue as to their identity, not to mention all the miscellaneous icons and bits and pieces that I don't even recognize .

How do I get rid of it, and can Recuva help me? Try not to laugh too hard, ok?

Hi uncleguido, and welcome to Piriform.

Try using another free Piriform product:

CCleaner:

All sites leave cookies, and Windows collects temp files of pages you access to make future access of these pages quicker.

CCleaner deletes all that stuff from your computer. Help file here:

Piriform Documents:

Use the "Cleaner" feature and leave the "Issues" part alone for now, and don't beat yourself up, we all had to learn sometime.

You wouldn't go far wrong by bookmarking this site, as there's a wealth of information to be gleaned, and a volunteer membership who attempt to solve every problem thrown at them, Piriform related or not.

Post back if you have any problems or queries.

Thanks for your response. I use CCleaner often, just this morning, and then ran Recuva for photos only; found 34,964 files, 72.0GB, all of which were junk with the exception of a few of my own photos that I've already saved to CD's. Saw no feature for deletion of all this junk. Did save a couple of samples via screen captures, just in case I need to make a point in future.

You didn't say you used CCleaner, but no worries, I'll ponder the newspaper photographs.

Here's my theory having noticed Recuva showing up internet pics/graphics myself, despite using CCleaner with secure delete. Assuming you have your internet cache set to a sensible value, say 80-100Mb, after a while browsing (especially if having viewed online vids) the cache will fill up and the older files in the cache will be deleted by Windows (unsecurely) to make room for new cache items. So even with running CCleaner, Recuva could still pick up plenty of pics from viewed websites that were deleted by Windows when cache got full.

EDIT: Whoops, didn't realise this was an old post.

Yeah, I get this too. There's stuff from yesterday's browsing (no CC use) and I'm sure I never get anywhere near my cache limits. I don't know if the browser auto-dumps this temp rubbish, it certainly appears to.

The most irritating is the BBC. I always end up with pics of those pompous, self-important, supercilious, smug and insuufferable z-list celebrity cooks sniggering at me. I have to secure overwrite those.