How do I completely clear deleted items from my work laptop?

[Fieldette]

I finish my job next week and I want to make sure that everything that was for personal use has been deleted completely.

I have had to use my personal camera for work purposes, therefore when I have uploaded work photos everything else has uploaded too. There's pictures of my family, house etc, nothing inappropriate but I'd rather they weren't left on the laptop. There's also the odd Word and Excel document for personal use too.

Now I have done the obvious and deleted them from my computer and also from the Recycling Bin, but am I correct in thinking that they are still retrievable? Or is this the kind of thing that can only be done by a real computer whiz IT person and I don't need to worry about the next person to have my laptop stumbling across them?

Thanks in advance.

If you have nothing to hide, then what you have done is enough.

I would also delete internet history and delete cookies too.

IT will probably go through the laptop anyone and give it a good clean.

Your employer may not care to try to recover deleted files from the hard disk but once the laptop becomes obsolete stock you don't know who the laptop will be sold to. If you don't mind some spotty teenage Eastern European hacker looking at your pictures then you've done enough :-)

I have a hard disk of with over 500gb of tv/film videos. I moved them onto my work laptop, filling up all available space. I then deleted them and repeated 2 more times. There is software that will totally remove your files but unless you are that serious about cleaning your laptop then my solution is good enough.

Also, you may want to get free download of CC Cleaner. It will clean all the cache/temp files that reveal your surfing history and the like.

There is no IT department here - only 6 employees and I am the most technologically advanced!

What is a CC Cleaner? Do I just put a search into Google or is there a particular one that you recommend? That would be worth doing by the sounds of things - clear my MN history!

On a separate note, I have an empty folder in the 'Documents' folder on the 'Libraries' section. I have deleted this folder a couple of times now, it allows me to do this, allows me to delete it from the Recycling Bin, but then when I go back into the Documents folder it's reappeared - do you know how I get rid of it permanently?

Thanks again.

ccleaner,will delete all your internet history and temporary files.It is widely used and highly recommended by techy people.I use it on a weekly basis.

Thanks Motion I'll give that a try.

What you have done is probably sufficient, I doubt anyone in your company would be inclined (or know how) to recover the files.

If you want to completely remove any traces of files then you need a program such as eraser.heidi.ie/index.php. Just filling the hard disk and deleting a couple of times is not sufficient if you want all traces destroyed - believe it or not, data isn't physically stored as 1s and 0s.