Google Search History Deletion
 

Am passing my old lap-top on to a friend and want to clear out as much history etc as possible.

All seems straightforward but how do I clear the search history from Google?. By this I mean when on Google's main site and there is a line to enter search words above the two buttons called "Google Search" and "I'm Feeling Lucky".

Currently when I click into this line a drop-down is then shown which lists every search term used since I bought the lap-top over 2 years ago - and I want to delete these.

I'm using IE7 as the web-browser - I guess there is a simple button to press or box to check somewhere.

You should be able to do this be going to Internet Options. In the General tab you should see a button called Delete or something like that (sorry, I'm currently using my Mac :D). When you click on the button, there should be a little window popping up where you can specify what you want to delete. Now look for something called "Form Data" - and press Delete.

If you're passing on a laptop that you've used for personal stuff (taxes, etc) then you will simply not get it all clean. Reformat the hard drive during a fresh Windoze install and hand the laptop over.

FYI, I recenly went out and bought XP/Pro/OEM with SP2 installed - it saves me hours of downloading krep MS patches. $78 bucks well spent.

Thanks - worked just fine ^ ^ ^

Actually, if you want to clear google search history. Go to Internet Option - Content - Auto Complete - Clear Form.
You can also clear stored passwords by choosing "clear password".

That is not working like you explain with IE 7.0 .. at least on my PC.

However, Robbiedeluxe's recommended procedure works just fine^

BOH:
Are you aware, "deleting" data like explained by Robbiedeluxe, and other "deleted" data can be "recovered" easily by almost any smart PC user.
I erased all data on my old PC with Norton, still was not convinced, that all data were finally destroyed, so I erased all data on the disk with a big hammer.:cool:

3 holes with a drill before the hammer is my favorite.

There are many documented cases incuding I think a best buy customer who had their hard drive cleaned and it tracked back to them after being resold.

So in this case its a friend you may not stress it. But in general physical destruction is your only safe method.

If you want to really delete all your data, you can download "file shredders" that will help. There's one included in Spybot S&D. They will overwrite the file being deleted with several different patterns making it nearly impossible for anybody to recover the data that was originally there.

If this is XP, why not create a new user for your friend and just delete the user account you used? Then, make sure any applications that stored data files (like quicken, turbotax, etc) in their program directories, remove those data files and account information as well. And also go through the registry and delete any stored history and personal settings.

It's not foolproof, and you can find a shredder that will shred all the free space if you're worried about it (and it's probably a good idea to do that).

A reinstall is the safest thing to do, but you'll still want to shred the free space after the reinstall. (ok, the super safest thing to do is to destroy the disk, but if you're diligent, and find everything, it should be ok.)

Newegg has the Seagate internal 2.5" 80G IDE drive for around $65 if you want to go the other way and reinstall onto a clean disk. Maybe you can get your friend to pay for the new hard drive?

-David

Let's take this a step further: put a new drive in the laptop, put the old drive in an external enclosure, and use it for backup. You'll need some form of backup anyhow. An external drive is one of the better approaches. That way you'll have all your old files, too.

Good idea .. here's the external 2.5" enclosure I used when upgrading my laptop hard drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817145658

-David

a quick way to delete search boxes

1. double click empty search box

2. move mouse over 1st item to highlight

3. shift +delete will delete items. hold down to delete many