The “Behind the Scenes” Blog of Pointstone Software

Another new feature available with Total Privacy 5.1 (and also available as a freeware utility) is a index.dat Viewer. What’s different about it is that it reads the index.dat files directly. This makes sure that what you see displayed by the program are the exact contents of the index.dat files.

What are Index.dat Files?

Index.dat are files hidden on your computer that contain all of the Web sites that you have ever visited. Every URL, cookies and browsing history is listed there. The file names and locations depend on what version of Internet Explorer you have. If you are running IE version 4.0 or above, the file name is “index.dat”.

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Today I’m going to focus on some of the new features of Total Privacy 5.1, starting with the Start Menu Click History Viewer (also known as Explorer UserAssist Data). This Viewer is available with Total Privacy (Privacy Items, Windows, Start Menu) and as a standalone freeware application.

What does the start menu click history shows? Every time you open a program from the start menu, the date and number of times you used it is stored in an encrypted database. The Start Menu Click History Viewer reads the Explorer UserAssist Data from the registry and allows you to see exactly that information is stored in this location.

When first looking at the contents of this registry key one might think they have been infected by a trojan or something. But in fact, it’s EXPLORER.EXE, a Windows system program, that writes these keys.

The above screenshot shows the contents of a system with little over 6 months that has never had any cleanup performed. There are 1103 entries including references to local files, titles of web pages, .url files in favorites, and shortcuts. There are entries for things accessed only when Windows was first installed (like drivers). This means that Windows logs this information and never deletes the log data. In addition of being a very high security risk this also bloats the registry, which fragments it, slowing Windows down.

The start menu click history can be found at the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\UserAssist

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We’ve added several new features and fixed a few minor issues in version 5.1.
The biggest changes to note are:

Pointstone Shredder. This new utility gives you direct access from Windows Explorer to securely delete files using one of the shredding algorithms included. Simply right-click on a file or folder and select “Pointstone Shredder”.

Index.dat Viewer. The index.dat Viewer reads the index.dat files directly showing you exactly what is stored in these files.

Start Menu Click History Viewer. With this viewer you can see all the information stored by Windows related to the programs and shortcuts you accessed from the start menu.

Fixed an issue that prevented removing index.dat files on some systems. Added option to hide the splash screen at program startup and support for ACDSee 8.

I’ll post a more detailed description about the Shredder, index.dat Viewer and Start Menu Click History Viewer tomorrow along with some screenshots.

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Welcome to the Pointstone Blog! 

In this space we will cover the most important features for each upgrade of our software along with information on future developments related with our products and tips and tricks that will make your computer cleaning, optimization and protection easier that ever before.