The first and easiest check will be to look in the browsing history of the browsers on the PC. This is a simple check and because of that is the one thing a careful internet user can cover his or her tracks on. Pressing Ctrl-H on most browsers will bring up the history. If you find it is cleared, you may have reason to continue your search since it is unusual to have this cleared unless the user is really trying to save space on his or her PC.

Next simple thing to do is to search windows using the search function (Start – Search). Search all files and folders on all drives looking for phrases you might be concerned about e.g. for pornography look for “xxx” or “sex”. This will find any traces of files saved or not cleaned out of the internet history or elsewhere.

Next search is appropriate for images, probably most useful in looking for pornography but could reveal other data. Download Picasa from Google here. Run it and have it index and search for all images on all drives. This will show you in the Picasa window, all the images it found no matter where they are on the PC.

Last tactic is the most comprehensive and will give absolute evidence of all activity on a PC is monitoring software that secretly records what is occurring on a PC showing a variety of activities such as instant messenger records, browsing history and more. Searching Google for computer monitoring software will give you a list of shareware and commercial software. One free screenshot grabber application which records pictures of the screen at time intervals I found for free is this. Commercial applications tend to be more comprehensive than this and some offer a 30 day free trial.

That’s it. Somewhere in the above list you will find out the activities on a PC when you are not there and provide full innocence or guilt of the suspected parties.

• Archive format:7z
• Compression level: Ultra
• Compression Method:LZMA
• Dictionary size: 64MB
• Word Size:64.

Once done you can delete those files you were trying to hide because they are now in the .7z file you just made. Open command prompt by going to start run and put in cmd. to make it easier make a folder on your desktop and put the .7z file and the .jpg file in the folder so its all in one place.

Lets call the folder its in x123 the .7z file shadow.7z and the .jpg return.jpg. So now in command prompt it should say c:/ documents and settings> "your pc's name">. Now next to that put cd x123 so it opens the folder it should now be c:/ documents and settings>"Your pc's name">x123>. After that put in COPY /B return.jpg + shadow.7z returnsecret.jpg after this it should say 1 file copied and there should be a new .jpg file in your x123 folder called returnsecret.jpg.

To get the files off of the new image file lets say you had passwords there and you need to get them back open 7-zip again and select returnsecret.jpg now press the extract button. There should now be a folder called returnsecret with the files you just hide inside the image. You can delete this folder and extract it again from the image over and over. Hide it in a thumbdrive,psp,external drive, iPod, or any mass media and only you will know that the files are there or even how to extract them.