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Privacy concerns about contents of HDD files Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 7:33 pm Posted by gewg_ (4444 messages posted) (was: File erase help) |I've used several "clean up" programs. Eraser, UltraWipe, | argon | Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) is another. They all work on disk space used by files which have been "deleted". |but I'm still finding things in the user.dat and "system.dat" files | Those are not "deleted"--and they are necessary to run Windoze. |that I would like to get rid of | You have identified one of the major differences between Unix-like operating systems and the Microsoft OS family. Unix (and Linux and Mac OS X and BSD and Solaris and QNX and ...) put data and settings in separate PLAIN-TEXT files (one per application). These can be modified with an ordinary text editor. Bill Gates, in his wisdom, thought it would be a good idea to put EVERYTHING in ONE place. (Actually, it's 2 files--the ones you identified.) Together, those are know as "the Windows Registry". They are NOT plain text and require a proprietary tool (RegEdit) to modify. In addition, by default, there are 5 backup copies of the Registry on your drive. We can pause here so you can thank Mr. Gates. To do what you desire would require you to nuke your Registry backups[1] then edit (by hand) your remaining copy of (the active copy of) the Registry. I should mention that on many people's systems, the Registry grows to a gargantuan size over a couple of years. Have fun editing that. If you have been running a Registry Cleaner utility over time, editing the Registry will be a slightly less colossal task. Now consider your Swap File which can also contain sensitive data and should be deleted on a regular basis. That file is *protected* under Windoze so that you can't nuke it--not without starting up in Real DOS(tm). We can pause again here for your continued thanks to Mr. Gates. This site's Webmaster is David A. Karp. Here's a chapter from his Win98 book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/win98annoy/chapter/ch06.html Search for "swap". (After nuking that file, Windoze will bitch when you start up, but will then build you a new file.) You haven't said specifically *why* you are so privacy-conscious, but if it's because of multiple users on the system, Win98 is a pretty lousy OS choice. Win9x's out-of-the-box security is non-existent (no individual user accounts). (Again, a Unix-like OS is superior.)[2] The System Policy Editor is a utility on your Windoze distribution CD. http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site:annoyances.org+poledit+users+jmc You can give passwords to each user and improve things a bit. It is not a small task to learn to use PolEdit. [1] If you are *properly* backed up, you already have at least 1 recent copy of your Registry on *removable* media. [2] ...and, if you're tired of giving your money to Micro$oft for lousy software, Linux is FREE (as are the BSD variants). [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: File erase help Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 5:41 am Posted by Keith Stanier (1655 messages posted) Well argon a program that I would recommend for cleaning up your crap is CCleaner. It has a mild registry cleaner and will also free up a lot of space if you haven't used it before, and its free. You haven't actually said how long since you last did a rebuild. Open Windows Explorer and check the date for the Windows folder, thats the last time it was rebuilt. If you don't have a Win98SE CD then get one of eBay. If you do and you have the drivers for all your additional hardware sound card, graphics card, printer, scanner etc then just format and do a rebuild. That way you know what is on there so the registry will have a smaller files. As gewg says you registry is backed up on every new day the computer starts up. By default it saves 5 backups in Windows\Sysbckup *.cab files. Now you can change the number of backups to what ever number you want by editing Windows\Scanreg.ini and in MaxBackupCopies=5 change the number to as many backups as you want. But I have found that when you need to do a Scanreg /restore it only list about 7 backups even though I've had 14 in Scanreg.ini, so I generally have 7 now. [Reply or follow-up to this message] Tip: Use one of the [Reply or follow-up to this message] links above to add a message to this thread Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows 98 Discussion Forum