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**Aswdwdfg** · 05-03-2006, 05:01 AM

My question is: How can I recover those bookmarked pages? I heard that everything you do on the computer is burned permantely into your hardrive or something. I would like to know how to gain access to it and recover my lost documents as well as those webpages. I need them for research on my project. If possible, I'd also like to get rid of those porn site "residue."...

Assuming things haven't changed much in the past couple years since I stopped doing support regularly...

1: Do as little as possible to avoid overwriting disk sectors you may want to recover.
2: Check the recycle bin, then run a file unerase utility (like norton or what not)
3: Search your drive for moved files (quite often people accidentally move files, instead of deleting them with the same symptom--they're gone)
4: Check the drive one more time for files just in case you missed them.

After that, run all the anti-spyware tools you can find or whatever else might work. Personally, I don't use IE and I run at a low security level, in order to prevent those things. I usually don't bother to recover a PC from such a state; I recover the data, wipe the system, and move on.

In the future, make another user account like the Guest account with limited priviledges. Put a simple password on your account, so that visitors will use the guest account instead of yours. It can be annoying, but better safe than...

With kids, my PC lasted at most 3 months between rebuilds until moved to Windows 2000 with restricted permissions. Now they've been very stable. It's pretty nice when visting users can't destroy things as they're in the visitor sandbox. (malicious people should be thrown out--fdisk isn't a cute joke)

05-03-2006, 05:01 AM	#11
Aswdwdfg Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 520 Senior Member	My question is: How can I recover those bookmarked pages? I heard that everything you do on the computer is burned permantely into your hardrive or something. I would like to know how to gain access to it and recover my lost documents as well as those webpages. I need them for research on my project. If possible, I'd also like to get rid of those porn site "residue."... Assuming things haven't changed much in the past couple years since I stopped doing support regularly... 1: Do as little as possible to avoid overwriting disk sectors you may want to recover. 2: Check the recycle bin, then run a file unerase utility (like norton or what not) 3: Search your drive for moved files (quite often people accidentally move files, instead of deleting them with the same symptom--they're gone) 4: Check the drive one more time for files just in case you missed them. After that, run all the anti-spyware tools you can find or whatever else might work. Personally, I don't use IE and I run at a low security level, in order to prevent those things. I usually don't bother to recover a PC from such a state; I recover the data, wipe the system, and move on. In the future, make another user account like the Guest account with limited priviledges. Put a simple password on your account, so that visitors will use the guest account instead of yours. It can be annoying, but better safe than... With kids, my PC lasted at most 3 months between rebuilds until moved to Windows 2000 with restricted permissions. Now they've been very stable. It's pretty nice when visting users can't destroy things as they're in the visitor sandbox. (malicious people should be thrown out--fdisk isn't a cute joke)
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