Secure delete of attachments in e-mail

can someone help me out with this one - I have a computer I just bought but need to return and my wife opened a confidential email with an excel attachment on it and I would like to erase/wipe the traces of it (it was not saved, just opened0. I believe the xls file is held in a temp folder in documents and settings in XP, would it be in the same place in Vista? Also are there any ~*.tmp files I need to find.

I can't wipe the entire drive because I need the OS in tact, but I did do a wipe of unused space after I wiped all the files I knew about, but I just thought of this attachment and I don't want to miss anything else.

Thanks for the help.

 

If that is all there is to it you could use Eraser to erase any of the temp files that were created when you opened the file. But I would also recommend you do a freespace wipe just to be on the safe side. There are other applications you could use too; such as Ccleaner, which is designed to remove temporary files. It also has a secure erase function.

 

Right I am asking for help to identify those

 

I would prefer to securely delete them.

Actually though, this tutorial may help me find them all.

 

In that case, you should always use this guide. It's been useful to me in the past.

You might also want to make sure that your swap file has been erased, or at least refreshed.

 

Ok, so I deleted IE content (using the standard IE tools) which I think would have deleted (not securely) most of the stuff. Then I ran the wipe of unused space which should have removed the traces of what I unsecurely deleted. This was last night.

Now I will do some secure deletes with CCleaner and by navigating to these folders for anything left over. then I will use the recovery partition to reimage the active partition to the way it was when I bought it.

Think that will cover me? Again- nothing confidential was directly saved - just that stupid email attachment was opened.