Sunday, March 02, 2008

Where one's stuff is splattered over windows

I find it frustrating that my "personal data" is often splattered all over different locations on Windows XP. Here's a list of some places that I've uncovered below. (My windows userid is "mbg".)

* List of recent files used in Office
C:/Documents and Settings/mbg/Application Data/Microsoft/Office/Recent

*
List of temp files
C:/Documents and Settings/mbg/Local Settings/Temp

* Contains list of profile directories
c:/Documents and Settings/mbg/Application Data/Thunderbird/profiles.ini

* contains X1 index files
C:/Documents and Settings/mbg/Local Settings/Application Data/X1 Desktop Search

* contains outlook data file
C:\Documents and Settings\mbg\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

* contains all of firefox's data, which is cleared by the clear private data command
C:\Documents and Settings\mbg\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ingyn1a7.default
C:\Documents and Settings\mbg\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\s2ocgep1.default

* contains all the pictures and videos from a palm sync, which don't seem to get deleted properly by the palm application.
C:\Documents and Settings\mbg\My Documents\My Pictures\Palm Photos\mbgtre\Expansion card 1319\Palm
C:\Documents and Settings\mbg\My Documents\My Pictures\Palm Photos\mbgtre\Internal\Palm
C:\Documents and Settings\mbg\My Documents\My Pictures
C:\Documents and Settings\mbg\My Documents\my videos\Palm Videos

* contains a listing of recent files opened
C:\Documents and Settings\mbg\recent

* cygwin home (could be reset to a different directory, useful to clear history)
C:\cygwin\home\mbg

* Windows Temp -- doesn't seem to have much personal data beyond what is cleared directly through clearing the IE cache
C:\WINDOWS\Temp

* Additional things include:
- removing all one's palm files (C:\...\palm)
- Disabling calendar sync stuff (e.g. change passwd on google calendar sync. & disable "syncmycal" agent)
- Start Picasa and remove all folders. Then it will compact its DB.
- Start firefox and delete all private data. Start IE and do the same .