Understanding history details

[Drlaura]

Forgive my ignorance about computers.

I have had a lot of people in and out over the holidays and when I did a history, I discovered an entire day was missing. When I hit the "Yesterday" tag, absolutely nothing showed. Further, I noticed my recycle bin was empty. So, I bought file-saver and restored my files. Files for the day before in the afternoon also were restored. The history showed a lot of things disabled prior to the questionable sites being visited. My guess is so that the sites could not send popups or emails to my computer.

Here are my questions:
1. Is there anyway for me to find out when my computer was altered? (recycle bin dumped, history dumped)
2. Is there any way I could have "false" history on my computer? Or even delayed history (some one was visiting porn sites earlier in the day)? I have blue-tooth, could this influence anything?
3. Can you delete history that has not happend yet? For example, could the person who visited porn earlier in the day have tried to delete it and affected the future of the computer? I know it is a stretch.

I asked the person who was on the computer at the time the history shows the second set of porn just to not do it on my computer. I am a psychologist and this is my professional computer--I don't want stuff popping up with my patients. He was the only other person here at that time. He swears he did not do it. I am guessing he is just is in extreme denial, but I want to be fair.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

 

[Peddant]

Looking at porn is a perfectly "healthy" thing to do.There`s nothing to feel guilty about.

 

[Drlaura]

I did not say it was unhealthy

My point is not about porn being healthy or not. That was my point to my friend. I don't care about the porn viewing, just not on my professional computer. I have been very clear with my friend that I don't care about porn--just where it was viewed. He still insists it was not him. I don't want to be friends with someone who would lie about something so stupid. But I don't want to falsely accuse either.

Now, do you have any answers to my questions? Or do you just want to defend your porn viewing?

 

[Peddant]

My post was a feeble attempt at a joke.I`m sure someone else can make a more helpful contribution.

 

[vhunter]

Well, you could always install something like Spector Pro to monitor the computer's usage. That would record everything on the computer, but that includes your activities, unless you only activated it when you're away from the computer.

 

[Peddant]

I think you misunderstand the situation vhunter Drlaura wants to gather detailed evidence of a past event,inorder to prosecute the suspect.In my humble opinion,acquiring that sort of detail is impossible.Or is it ?

 

[Drlaura]

Thanks. . .

I think I will just put my computer away when people come over from now on. : )

So, nothing would show up on the web log (or anywhere else in the computer) regarding time of deletion?

 

[Drlaura]

Message to Peddant:
Ahuh. . . .

 

[vhunter]

Technically, one might be able to carve the history logs out of the free space if it hasn't been deleted yet. There are companies you can go to in order to do something like that, but I'm not sure if it will work on the web log and how much it would cost.

 

[Drlaura]

History Problem

Thanks for the info. Today through a trial and error exercise I found out that during an attempted defrag my computer deleted all the history for earlier in the day. It is possible that is what occurred with the missing day of history. I had not looked at the history for the day before prior to getting the software to restore it. The sites "visited" were possibly pop ups off of a sports site as they were 1 second-long. The sites visited on the actual missing day were the usual (sports scores, newspapers, etc.). The trash may have been dumped by the person using the computer earlier in the day or it may also be part of the defrag.

My computer keep crashing during any attempts at defragging, so it is impossible at this point to check the defrag settings. I need to take it in for a checkup. But I was unaware the defrag deleted the history. At least it did today. . . .

Thanks again for your help.

 

[Peddant]

Try defragging in SAFE MODE http://www.pchell.com/support/safemode.shtml