Registry cleaning for Privacy

Even if people think registry cleaning is generally unuseful, or potentially dangerous, which it can be, using one to delete records for privacy reasons is definately worthwhile.

I use one at least once a week, and find dozens of entries for deleted things including, but not limited to, the following.

Downloads

PDF's

DOC's

TEMP's

Start menu items

Desktop items

All the above have the names of the files etc, and dates/locations they were placed. If any of these are private/confidential/secret etc, it could give someone clues, or more, you might prefer they didn't have.

Of course it finds a lot other entries for the usual stuff you might expect to see, but for the purpose of this thread, i'm only concentrating on highlighting DELETED entries.

 

Believe it or not, the simple MRU-Blaster from Javacool still gets a lot of those. It hasn't been updated in years, but amazing though how much it still gets.

A good way to find all these is to spend some time with the registry before you do any cleaning at all and do some random searching for keywords, wild card extension searches, etc.

 

I bet r wipe gets rid of it.

 

I use the registry scanner of CCleaner once a week (whilst always remembering to make a backup) That seems to catch many of the things you talk about, but I don't know whether it gets everything. It's a shame, but OS like Windows are not made for privacy.

 

I run another cleaner first because it's better at Index Dat etc wiping, and then i also run MRU-Blaster, and afterwards CCleaner, and they ALWAYS find some things that the others miss ?

Even so, if i run my reg cleaner after these two, i still find some entries that i listed earlier

Windows, what a wind up, but as we know, these things are a "feature" not a mistake

 

I mentioned in post 4 that you might want to so those registry searches before a cleaning. You might also want to do the same after a cleaning. Put in photos you recently viewed, files recently opened, videos and use as many of your installed programs as possible. Look not just for the program, but for the file names opened and used by those programs.

 

East-Tec Eraser 2010 is the only way to go! Nothing else compares!

 

Hi there,

I tested several 'cleaning tools' and playing around with r-wipe for a while I noticed that tool goes really deep into the corners of my computer and cleaned
without leftovers. By the way the company behind r-wipe is a computer forensic company. They know what and how to clean.

true north

 

Appologies for not replying sooner

@caspian

Have you tried it, if so did it ?

@ploder

You can say that again

@LockBox

Think you meant Post 2

Yes i agree, and i do still find entries such as those etc, in the REG after using cleaners. That's why i delete them with a reg cleaner, and then Securely delete any backups of those.