How Do I Check What Has Happen on My Computer?

Yesterday, a workman used my computer without authorisation while I was not present. Looking at the list of files that had been opened that day as according to Internet Explorer, at least one sensitive document was accessed, and more could have been, but I do not know whether any others were, since I had also accessed some of the sensitive files that day.

Is there any way I can find out exactly what was done to the computer; more specifically whether any files were copied to a removable storage device or otherwise copied?

 

What operating system? I don't know of any that do file activity logging by default. That's a massive amount of information.

Do you have I.T. support? If so, they might have a better knowledge of your computer and network configurations, and whether anything of the sort has been set up.

 

It's Windows XP, Service Pack 1.

And no, I don't have I.T. support.

 

Yes, it is a home computer.

I had shut the computer down, but since I hadn't password protected any of the accounts, all the nosey workman had to do was start it up. I set up passwords as soon as I found out what had happened.

I did used to have Service Pack 2, but I recently had to reinstall Windows, and doing so removed this.


In any case, thank you for your help, even though you were unable to resolve the immediate problem.

 

Go to every web site and email and change ALL your passwords! Someone stealing your passwords can then have free reign to all your emails and any other site you are a memeber.

 

You might like to check out Start-->My Recent Documents (if available on your system). It will show the last 15-20 documents . It might help. Depends on how much work you have done since the workman used your PC. Bazza

 

This is a good time to remind users who do online banking and such to change the security setting in Internet Explorer to prevent caching encrypted (banking) pages.

Then workmen will have no secure IE data to find.

Open IE(all versions)>tools>(internet)options>advanced tab

scroll down to the security section and make sure
'do not save encrypted pages to disk'
is ticked.

Do this separately for all user accounts.