I will try to make this simple, i got a computer from a neighbor (Sony Vio) 20g hardrive pent 4 windows xp home edition, i wanted to know is there a way to go in somewhere to find out what websites or videos he has been watching and permanent delete them?? i know that he visted certain adult websites and he says that he had cleaned his cookies, history and all but can't you go in somwhere to find out for sure??

Use Eraser program on it.
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

or

Use the manufacturer HDD utility for it to zero fill the HDD.

Before zero-filling it, does you/your friend have anything important, docs files, eyc. on the hd? Copy it to your main hd to back the data up, (if you can;'t, burn it to a cd/dvd).

as far as i know just general stuff, but i wanted to know the command to get in and see what is on the hard drive that was deleted in temp files and cookies ans so fourth, just nosy i guess but want to erase it without reformatting the hard drive,

Use Eraser program on it.
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

or

Use the manufacturer HDD utility for it to zero fill the HDD.
how do you do that and where do you go??? sorry i am a noob

On my Win98 system "C:\WINDOWS\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\index.dat" is the file that keeps a record of every website that has ever been visited [including date & time of visit] since the Operating System was installed. I can use "Spider" [difficult to find on the web nowadays] to view the contents of that file and/or delete the contents.

I once used Netmeeting to be given control of the PC of someone in Oregon USA, transferred the Spider installation program to their PC and installed it, took a quick look at the contents of their file to check there were some, and then deleted the contents. Neat! :D :cool:
I was doing this from Scotland.

Eraser is a great little program that complements the "Delete" facility.
It writes multiple patterns [you specify how many], so anything "Erased" is practically/effectively irrecoverable.
The alternative is that you delete as normal [send it to the Recycle Bin], then empty the Recycle Bin, then right-click on the C: drive and click "Erase Unused Space" and specify how many overwrites. What it does is write a HUGE file [with patterns of zeros and ones] that fills all the empty space.
If you use more than 1 pattern it takes a LONG time to complete.

Anything deleted goes to the bin [is still using space on the HDD] and is easily restored to it's former state.
Once deleted from the bin it is still on the HDD somewhere [the space is marked as available and it may eventually be overwritten to reuse the space], and can be undeleted.
Once effectively "erased", it cannot be recovered [except possibly by expending huge amounts of time and effort and money].

Eraser can make a "Boot and Nuke Disk".
With this you reboot to the program on the floppy and use that to erase the whole contents of the drive.
I began doing that once and gave up because it took so long. You'd need to start it before going to bed and hope it would finish by the morning.
There are simpler zero-fill utilities.
I have "wipe.com" [the one I normally use, it's simple and quick] & "zap.com" on a floppy.

I installed and reinstalled the eraser program and everytime it finishes scanning my c-drive and i look into the file and view the log it says ( fail to erase file on unused disk space) it says this for every file on my c drive, why won't it erase or is it? please help

i have windows xp home edition, and i seem to not find that file or what do i put in to find it, sorry

Download "Eraser 5.7" from here http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/download.php by clicking on one of the "Download" buttons.

Download the "Wipe" and "Zap" utilities [they are supplied together as a pair] here http://www.digitalissues.co.uk/html/os/misc/ibm-wipe-zap.html#3

i will try that, thanks

now this program will it zap the unused space on my hardrive or which part will it zap?, sorry i am new at this

1. If you use Eraser within the Windows environment you can [if you wish] right-click on a drive/partition and choose "Erase unused space".
That not only erases all the "empty" space on the partition [that marked as available or free for use (deleted files etc)], but also erases the unused space within clusters being occupied by files.
Erasing involves writing multiple patterns of 1's and 0's [you choose the number of writes] to a HUuuuge file that uses all the "empty" space.

2. "Wipe" [or "Zap"] writes a single set of zeros to the whole of the HDD regardless of how many partitions are on it.
There seems to be a limit to the size of HDD it can write and it may be that with large drives only that part of the drive is zero'd; I'm not sure about that.
That will, of course, eliminate everything that was previously on the drive; files, partitions, formatting, infections, the lot.

Someone that I recommended this to reported just yesterday that they thought Wipe, fdisk, format.com were a great combination and had fixed their problem.

thanks, i will try that

It depends what you told it to do.

Did you right-click on C: and choose "Erase unused space"?

If you did, then you have not told it to erase any visible folders or files.
What you have told it to do is to "Erase" [write (the number you specified of) patterns of 1's and 0's to]:
a. The empty space on the drive.
b. All the files and folders deleted to the Recycle Bin then deleted from the bin.
c. All the "Cluster Tips" [that space on clusters allocated to files but not used].

Have you ever right-clicked a file and chosen "Erase"?

You can "Delete" files to the Recycle Bin, then "Erase Recycle Bin" [actually it only erases the contents, not the bin itself].
You can delete files to the bin, then delete them from the bin, then [after lots have been ersaed] "Erase unused space" to make them ALL unrecoverable.

Just discovered that "Wipe" & "Zap" only zero-fill a maximum of 8 GB.

So I've been trying out free "Killdisk" from www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm
This is much more sophisticated [the free version writes only one set of zeros] than Wipe [can handle large HDD greater than 128 GB].
It gives lots of simply & clearly displayed information on the drive and it's partition arrangement [e.g. Primary Partition + Extended Partition with its included Logical Partitions].
You can choose to erase the whole drive or any number of individual partitions.

In the very first reply, as well as Eraser, PrntRhd recommended to "Use the manufacturer HDD utility for it to zero fill the HDD."

Good advice.