Mac clean-up

[pattayaplayer]

I have a Mac laptop which I use for business and pleasure. The pleasure part involves surfing boards like Addicts, viewing photos on Addicts and other sites and following links to porn video sites and others of similar interest. Now I'm going to get a new laptop at work and pass the existing one on to a more junior employee. How can I wipe all traces of my surfing history and downloads off the laptop before I pass it on. This non-techy would appreciate the advice of more computer savvy board members. Thanks.

[Freeze]

I have a Mac laptop which I use for business and pleasure. The pleasure part involves surfing boards like Addicts, viewing photos on Addicts and other sites and following links to porn video sites and others of similar interest. Now I'm going to get a new laptop at work and pass the existing one on to a more junior employee. How can I wipe all traces of my surfing history and downloads off the laptop before I pass it on. This non-techy would appreciate the advice of more computer savvy board members. Thanks.

 

All traces - reformat the drive and reinstall the OS.

[grityorteef]

You might also like to try "CleanMyMac" from MacPaw.

 

The link is: http://www.macpaw.com

 

It is a shareware program. In its unpaid form it only allows you to clean up to 500MB of junk out of your system.

 

grit

[philkrenshaw]

You can remove old stuff while in your browser.

With Safari, go to the History menu and choose Clear History... at the bottom of the menu.

Then in the Safari menu choose Empty Cache...

In the Bookmarks menu, choose Show All Bookmarks... they delete (select and backspace) any ones you don't want around.

 

Alternatively, you can do a find (from the finder) and search for files called History, Cache, Bookmarks, etc. and delete these files when you find out where they are.

[T-T-T]

Only truly safe way is to buy a new hard drive for it and install the OS. keep your old one for storage for yourself. But yes you can format it and reinstall the OS. Ensure you format all the partions as it might install a secondary OS

[pattayaplayer]

You can remove old stuff while in your browser.

With Safari, go to the History menu and choose Clear History... at the bottom of the menu.

Then in the Safari menu choose Empty Cache...

In the Bookmarks menu, choose Show All Bookmarks... they delete (select and backspace) any ones you don't want around.

 

Alternatively, you can do a find (from the finder) and search for files called History, Cache, Bookmarks, etc. and delete these files when you find out where they are.

 

Thanks. Is that enough to avoid anyone finding any of my surfing history later on? I'm concerned the computer will land with some-one who is very tech savvy and I want to be sure there no trace of sites I've visited or photos or videos I may have viewed or downloaded.

[philkrenshaw]

Thanks. Is that enough to avoid anyone finding any of my surfing history later on? I'm concerned the computer will land with some-one who is very tech savvy and I want to be sure there no trace of sites I've visited or photos or videos I may have viewed or downloaded.

When you clear history, make sure you also get rid of your top sites.

Get rid of all your cookies (Go to Safari Preferences---Choose Security---click on Show Cookies----click on Remove All).

Do a Secure Empty Trash (from the Finder) if you've thrown out any files.

 

If you want to get rid any traces of stuff you may have deleted in the past with a regular Empty Trash, you can fill up most of the empty space on your hard drive with something which will overwrite all the old data, then put all the stuff that you used to overwrite in the trash and delete it (don't need to do secure empty trash at this point, since recovery would just find the stuff you filled the hard drive with, not the old stuff you overwrote).

An easy way to fill up the empty space on your hard drive is to take a really large file (say, a multiple GB size video) and Duplicate it a bunch of times. (If you do all the duplication in a folder, all you have to do is put the folder in the trash when you're done.) I don't think you have to fill up the HD all the way unless you've filled it most of the way before, since I think it kind of fills from one "end" to the other and if you've never been nearly full before, the last part won't have had any of your stuff in it anyway. This could take a while if you have a really big hard drive with lots of empty space. You can probably think of other ways to fill it up by dragging things in from another HD if you have one, or duplicating folders full of stuff, etc.

Edited November 11, 2010 by philkrenshaw

[greatness]

I have a Mac laptop which I use for business and pleasure. The pleasure part involves surfing boards like Addicts, viewing photos on Addicts and other sites and following links to porn video sites and others of similar interest. Now I'm going to get a new laptop at work and pass the existing one on to a more junior employee. How can I wipe all traces of my surfing history and downloads off the laptop before I pass it on. This non-techy would appreciate the advice of more computer savvy board members. Thanks.

 

like everyone has suggested, I'd go with a reformat. If you don't want to pursue that route, you could also use Onyx. Here's a description taken from macupdate; OnyX is a multifunction utility for Mac OS X. It allows you to verify the Startup Disk and the structure of its System files, to run miscellaneous tasks of system maintenance, to configure the hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock and of some of Apple's own applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and more. Here's a link to MacUpdate that has a few reviews on it. http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11582/onyx