How to Erase Questionable Items & Images From a Hard Drive
- 1). Download a freeware cleaning program. The best out available is CCleaner, or Crap Cleaner, which is designed to clean all temporary items from a hard drive without harming any other items such as documents, music or videos. If these are the "questionable items" that need to be deleted, then you must go into the relevant program and delete these by hand.
- 2). Go to the CCleaner website. Download the latest version of the program. The process is simple and menu-driven. No particular expertise is necessary to download this, and, again, it is a free program.
- 3). Go to the "options" section in the program. This can be found when the program opens, on the bottom left side. Click it and go to "settings." At the very bottom, there are several options for the number of "passes" the system will go through to destroy your temporary files originating from the Internet. It is a good idea to lean towards the more secure methods of elimination (or more passes), which indicates that the items cannot be recovered. The more "passes" the system makes when destroying files, the smaller the pieces the file is broken down into. The more tiny pieces, the more difficulty exists in putting it back together again and hence restoring. Therefore, maximizing the number of passes is a good idea. For CCleaner, the maximum is 35 passes, which means the items to be deleted can not realistically be placed back together again.
- 4). Click the "cleaner" button at the top of the program. You can hit "analyze," which will show you the files that the system has found to destroy. If there are objects you do not want destroyed, you can highlight the item, left click on the mouse, and save the file without destroying it. Once satisfied, hit "run cleaner" at the bottom right. The system will then be cleansed. The system will also empty and destroy anything in the computer's trash can.
- 5). Do nothing further. The system will normally shut itself off after cleaning your system.
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