# Do USB drives leave a trace?



## tisa6363 (Sep 20, 2011)

OK, so this is a bit of an embarrassing question...

I travel a lot for work and take a company laptop with me. On a recent trip I plugged in my own USB flash drive to look at some... erm ... adult pictures and videos. Will this leave any trace on the hard drive of the laptop?

I watched some avi files in media player and also played around with editing some JPEGs in microsoft paint. Everything was opened from and saved to the USB drive - but will it leave any files on the hard drive of the host computer?

If it helps, the computer is an older model Sony Vaio and itruns Windows XP.

Hope you can help, as I'd much rather my boss didn't find out I've been looking at porn!!


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## koala (Mar 27, 2005)

There will be a log of the history in Windows Media Player if it's been configured in the options to store the history. Same for MS Paint under the Recent Pictures menu.


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## tisa6363 (Sep 20, 2011)

Thanks for your reply. I'll make sure to clear those spots.

Will there be any other files/trace on the hard drive somewhere?


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## koala (Mar 27, 2005)

Possibly in the Windows Temp folder. There might also be a hidden thumbnails file if you used an image viewer, but that wouldn't contain any obvious indicators. I can't think of any other locations.

Run CCleaner and select the appropriate files to clear under the Windows section. Don't run the Registry Cleaner part though.


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