Video Files

Can someone tell me how you can acess old video files that either someone else put on your computer, or files that you no longer want on your computer? I bought a new-used computer and I had the tech who sold it to me go into my music files and transfer some music that I had recorded on my old computer, to my new computer. He actually took out my hard drive from my old computer and transfered the wanted files to my new computer. But when he opened up my music and sound files, I saw all kind of sound files from years ago such as short audio lines and sound effects from "Star Wars" movies that I didn't think were recored as files on my computer. When I saw those files, it made me think about video and image files that still may be on my computer that I no longer want on my computer. I didn't feel comfortable asking the tech how to look up video and image files, but I was wondering if anyone at this forum knew how to. Also, is erasing the hard drive the only way to get rid of those files?

 

the simplest way is to open up the search tool in your start menu. It will let you perform a search by file type, such as video or picture, and it will find all of those files that might be on your computer.

if you fool around in the advanced options of the search, you can tell it to search hidden files and folders as well.. hope that helps.

 

Do a search for each of the following:

*.AVI
*.MPEG
*.MOV


Steve

 

Thanks guys. If I did everything correctly, I didn't seem to see any of the video files or images that I was talking about. I'm guessing that if you just "Open" a file, and don't "Save" it to you computer, the file won't be listed as a file on your computer. Although of course it will be stored on your hard drive.

 

when you 'open' a file from the internet, it gets stored into your internet cache of temporary files. These files periodically get deleted unless you do something to them yourself.

 

I'm going to be selling my old computer and I still would like to erase the hard drive(because of credit card numbers also). Does anyone know of any good hard drive erase programs? I'm not sure how well it will work, but I'm going to attempt to use this one:

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,6270,00.asp

If anyone knows of a better one, let me know. Thanks.