cleaners

blues · Post by **blues** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 11:06 am

What's the story with cleaners such as Evidence Eliminator? Do they work? Are they scams with their own security/privacy problems? Is there one that's better than others? They say that clearing cookies, caches, etc. doesn't really get rid of that stuff, that your history is still in there. True? What's the best way to get rid of internet travel traces?

drdoug99 · Post by **drdoug99** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 12:37 pm

http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/evi ... liminator/

after reading that, and after a quick browse at the Evidence eliminator website, I say it's complete trash.

Do you really have anything bad on your PC that you feel should be cleaned up?
that evidience eliminator makes it seem like everyday people have their computers infested with porn and sick twisted stuff, and only their program works the best, so fork over $149.95 to clean it up?? what a joke.

now, goto http://www.ccleaner.com and use that. it's a great general cleaning program, gets rid of temp files, internet files, etc.

Going to Internet Explorer, Tools, Internet Options, and clearing your cookies and history will work too. Yes it really gets rid of the stuff as far as basic means. and if you have such sick incrimating stuff that you really need to clean it good, or don't want to have your parents find out you look at porn

then using CCleaner or any other good well known program will work fine.

Any data can be recovered by professionals short of physically destroying the hard drive...also formatting the drive and writing data to it several times over will usually completely mangle any previous data so that's it's unrecoverable.

There's free programs out there that lets you wipe your drive, or like "file shredders" that "completely erase your data, deleting it from the recycle bin is not enough!!!" this is what they do...overwrite the file or data several times over so that it's unreadable and completly "erased".

blues · Post by **blues** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 1:40 pm

Dear drdoug99

Thanks for your quick reply. I downloaded ccleaner.com. The browser they clean is Internet Explorer. I now use Mozilla Firefox. Do I need to adjust anything with ccleaner.com, or will they automatically remove cookies, history, etc. from Firefox?

blues

drdoug99 · Post by **drdoug99** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 6:17 pm

Hi, please look at my screenshot below.

notice that I clicked on the Applications tab, and Mozilla Firefox is listed.
Just make sure to check the appropriate boxes.

Virtuoso · Post by **Virtuoso** » Sat Jan 29, 2005 5:18 pm

I have tried and recommend the following cleaners:

CCleaner
Spybot
System spyware interregator
Ad-Aware
Microsoft Anti-spyware

These are all free and very effective. Nowadays you need more than one spyware software to detect certain spyware on your computer.

Dark_Regent · Post by **Dark_Regent** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 9:09 pm

Can you provide a link to this one.System spyware interregator. I tried to google it but it didnt return any hits.

drdoug99 · Post by **drdoug99** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 9:14 pm

http://msn-cnet.com.com/System-Spyware- ... 33429.html

i tried it....wasn't really impressed, as my system is kept pretty clean just by using firefox alone...then with spyware blaster and spybot and adaware, i found that SSI wasn't necessary.

what it does is detect spyware, and then you can send the results back to the company to analyze it...it's a good idea, in how it's meant to track new spyware that's undetected by other programs.