4 Key Questions / Please for Help!

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Anonymous

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I am sorry to bother all of you. I just have 4 questions:

1. Why will Eraser not remove my temporary Internet files and my History file? My goal is to schedule this task daily as I do with the erasure of empty space on hard drives. I have tried various settings and have been unsuccessful.

2. How can I secure erase internet related files safely and accurately in the registry? ( There is a product on the market called "Evidence Eliminator" which claims to do this.)

3. What is a wildcard and when should I use this setting?

4. Should I always keep the setting "Pseudonumber Generation - Enable random (slow) entropy polling" checked?
And if so why? and if not, why not? I am using the 35 overwrite for files and the 7 overwrite for the empty disk space (assuming these are both better than a single passs with the psudorandom). Is this True?

Thank you, thank you, thank you to any and all who can assist.
 
1. Eraser cannot remove temporary Internet files and history file because the index.dat files are "locked" by Windows. If you don't know what index.dat is, they are files hidden on your computer that contain all of the Web sites that you have ever visited. They can not be erased manually. Even if you clean up your cache, cookies, and history from within the Internet Explorer browser regularly, the index.dat files can not be erased and will continue to store information about what web sites you have visited and what cookies have been saved. If you want to delete your temporary Internet files and history files, I recommend you download spiderbite from http://www.fsm.nl/ward/. Run spiderbite to remove index.dats and then run freespace wipe using eraser. However, if you are serious about security, I highly recommend you download Firefox from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. That way, you can schedule and erase temporary Internet files, history file, and cookies which does not have locked index.dat files. If you still want to use IE, then you can download BCWipe as it has the ability to unlock index.dat files and overwrites them.

2. I'll let someone else to answer for this.

3. A wildcard is a special symbols that can be used to search for any number of significant characters. In fact, it actually allows you to specify files by directly entering the location of the files instead of browsing for files or folders. You do not have to use it unless you know the location of the files.

4. I strongly suggested you turn off background entropy polling. To see why, go to http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/faq.php#using. Yes, it is true that 35 and 7 passes are better than a single pass. However, a single pass can still defeat the most powerful recovery tools.
 
4 Key Questions Reply To A Solid Answer...

:arrow: I began to follow your advice, and downloaded the BC Wipe, etc. You are obviously very knowledgable.
However, I also re-read the Eraser info page as you suggested and found a line that stated that the index.dat file could be removed if set to Erase at Reboot. I set that up, yet it did NOT remove the file, nor the History files, etc. Any other thoughts (if you have the time). Thanks again.
 
To be honest with you, erasing index.dat on reboot will not work. I already tried on mine and I get the same results as you do. I don't know how it got in the faq stating you could remove index.dat if set to erase at reboot, but that's simply not true. I believe it's a mistake to include this line in the faq and should be removed to avoid confusion.
 
If you are using XP logon as a different user and then delete the dat files
 
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