Augeas

Not by default as CC only cleans known temp files on the system drive (which I assume is C). You can of course include files and folders to be cleaned, but CC will wipe the entire folder irrespective of the contents.

I agree prefetch is neither *** or watercress (youngsters and non-UK'ers will have to guess or google that). But I thought prefetch only contained info on load optimisation of applications, not Windows O/S, so wouldn't be used at bootup? I suppose, on thinking about it, if you had lots of applications in your startup then yes, it could come into play.

You can run CC as often as you wish. I guess most people run CC depending on their pc activity, whether they are epic surfers or download addicts, etc. I am a modest user and run CC about twice a week, clearing out around 20 to 30 mb a time. Small beer, really. I'm not sure what safe mode 32 steps means. Secure overwrite? Once will do, and saves so much time. PS Posting in colour is so not done, dude.

Personally I only have the Old Prefetch Data and User Assist History ticked (and Custom Files/folders, but that's only relevant if you have included/excluded files). That should be quite safe. I would steer clear of ticking anything which throws up a warning message. In your Vista question, if you mean that you have thousands more files than when you had Win 2k then I'm not at all surprised. I'm sure there are some, if not many, that can be removed, there may be some info on Google. Or some Vista expert may drop by.

Hmmm, just tested this with one file cut/pasted to a flash drive, and the 'old' file is clearly found by Recuva under its correct name. Try a normal scan on all drives of your laptop (no science, just clutching at straws).

I meant that you were scanning three logical drives, which I assumed - possibly incorrectly - from your first post. I don't know of a way to save the scans either, you can't even cut and paste the filenames.

If you mean the list of deleted file names then you can't. They remain as entries which are flagged as deleted in the MFT, and Recuva will list them. I'm not quite sure what the point of Running Recuva would be if it didn't show any results.

Jeez, I'm getting dozens of the exceedingly annoying bu**ers.

I still have, stuck away in some dusty corner of my shed, an XT from 1984, I think. Only one 5.25 floppy and a 40 mb disk, can't remember the ram or the DOS version. I remember coding the snake game on it. I am waiting for it to appreciate in value!

It doesn't look as if there is a way to sepcify scans at drive level, only logical partitions. You're apparently only scanning three drives, so you would only have to do this twice. In any event it would make the interrogation of a huge amount of files a little easier to manage. Are you using deep scan? At four hours a pop I guess the answer is yes.

I assume that you deleted the pictures from your laptop hd? How did you do that, via the recycler, with CC, or shift/del? Are they in the recycler?

You will need to tick the Custom Files and Folders box in Cleaner/Advanced to get CC to action the included folders. Assuming you are not trying to remove system folders, I am not sure why you are being prevented from deleting these folders. CC will not be able to delete folders you cannot delete manually.

If you can't load the program then reinstall it and don't untick the Desktop shortcut and Program list boxes. You will then have a shortcut on your desktop and an entry in the program list. If you can load the program then just press the scan box at the top left of centre, or follow the startup wizard.

Because the technical difficulties in achieving this directly are, I imagine, immense and fraught with danger, which is why applications such as Sdelete don't try. To access the MFT, locate the records flagged as deleted, rename them, and maintain the index structure, all the time dodging any legitimate new file name creation, whilst maintaining the MFT mirror in sync, and guaranteeing that the operation is future-proof, sounds like suicide to me. From what I can glean programs which do 'erase' MFT file names do so by bludgeoning the disk to death as part of free space cleaning (er, overwriting - nothing 'cleans' disk space). They allocate sufficient large enough files to completely fill the disk, using all the free space. These files will encroach on the MFT zone and the MFT will be unable to expand. Then a succession of small files is allocated, with zero or some bland filename. These files will fit entirely into the MFT records. Eventually the entire MFT is full and all the files are deleted, leaving a great many deleted but safe file names. Where does Recuva fit in? It doesn't. Recuva is a file recovery program, not a disk scrubber, and should remain so. PS You can of course get rid of all those annoying deleted file names yourself. Just knock up some method of allocating a thousand small files with some incrementing file name. If you have 5000 deleted files then allocate five times, and overwrite the embarrassing residue of your activities in the MFT. Oh yes, don't forget to delete them afterwards.

Unless I'm missing something (don't all shout at once) just click the red x in the top right corner of the FF browser window to close FF. If you have several tabs open it will prompt to close them all. You can say yes, or close the tabs before closing the browser. You can open FF again from the program list or your desktop (and lots of other places), and you can reinstate recently closed tabs if you wish. Are you from Jawja?

Yes, I get this message too (as many others must). Just close Firefox before running CC. I don't bother to disable AVG, in fact I don't really worry about whether everything is shut down or not. It's no great deal, anything that isn't cleaned can be swept up next time. I use FF mainly, but sometime I browse a little using IE with FF still open. After I've done I run CC in secure delete mode, still with FF open, so that only the IE browsing info is cleared. It just securely clears a few mb instead of wasting effort wiping all the FF stuff, which is normally deleted once or twice a week.

I don't use the recycler, not with CC anyway, so I'm not familiar with what's happening there. I think we'll have to wait for another opinion, many do use this method. It is possible to find a lot of files using deep scan that you thought were deleted, and indeed I have found files which I know I have never deleted or ever even looked at (Windows' boring wallpaper, for instance). These could be the residue of defrags, edits, reallocated bad clusters, etc. Or even rewrites due to superparamagnetic decay.

One overwrite pass (let alone 35) will overwrite data so that it can not be recovered. If you are retrieving valid data from overwritten files then: 1) The files have not been overwritten. CC secure overwrite will rename the files to a variation of ZZZZ.ZZ. Are your files renamed this way, or do they have some other filename? 2) The space the overwritten files occupied has been allocated to a new file, and this is what you are seeing. In the Recuva Info panel, does it say that the files have been overwritten? If you have securely deleted the files with CC and then immediately looked at them with Recuva then this is going to be unlikely. If the files were overwritten with CC some time ago there is more chance that they now have a new occupant. Is this one file, some or all securely deleted files? Are you using normal scan to find the files or deep scan?

If the hypothetical wife is savvy enough to use CC to view cookies she will soon find another way to root out his browsing activity. Right, I'm off to have a look at dome.org and Ilikesmallb00bies.com.

I have read your post from cover to cover and I still can't quite grasp what you mean. If you want to protect your privacy then removing cookies from CC's list but not removing them from your disk is not the way to do it. You can of course delete cookies in the list by ticking the Cookies box in Cleaner/Windows/Internet Explorer and/or Cleaner/Applications/Firefox or whatever, and runnning CCleaner. Unless you run CC after every session on your pc there will be many ways in which the casual observer can see where you've been.

Could be. I downloaded an update fine as usual this morning.

I think sys restore uses a max of 12.5% of the disk by default, and shouldn't get anywhere near that in normal useage. XP Home and a few ancillaries uses less than 10 gb. Using over 30 gb of space in two months is about 500 mb a day downloaded to your pc. I may be wrong, but that seems like an awful lot to me. Are you sure you are clearing out your temp internet files and temp folders? If you are, then that 30 gb is stuff you downloaded to keep. Have a look in your folders, esp My Documents. Open c:\Documents and Settings\your name, and see what the size of My Documents folder is. Do the same with c:\Windows\Temp. See if you can find any huge folders, and let us know what they are.

If you use secure deletion, one overwrite, the data held in the sectors addressed by the file will be unrecoverable forever. The filename will remain in the MFT but will be changed to some combination of ZZZZ.ZZZ: the MFT entry will eventually be used for a new file name (in most cases). However it is possible that the deleted file could be recovered. There may well be sectors floating about in hiberfile, pagefile, sys recovery, bad sectors, temp copies used in edits, and no doubt other places not only that I can't think of at the moment, but those I don't know about at all. Some of these sectors might be recoverable with Recuva deep scan. Others won't easily be accessible, except to data recovery experts. For most people CC secure deletion is fine. Even Recuva deep scan is pretty fine, due to the time it takes and the amount of files to plough through if you don't know the file name you're looking for. And data recovery experts? Do you worry about them?

The problem with that is that the list of deleted files is a moving base, so that it won't necessarily represent the state of the disk when you return to the task. I know you can scan in one window and do some other work and return to the Recuva window later: I don't know what file status validity checking Recuva does. You could speed up your task dramatically, by a factor of 34 in fact, by just using one pass to overwrite data. The reason why has been discussed on this forum many times, or you could spend ten minutes on Google or Wikipedia.

What does your pc think the capacity of the flash drives is?