Internet Cleanup

You don’t have to be paranoid to buy Internet Cleanup–despite the packaging message : “Who’s watching what you browse on the Internet?” The fact is that what we surf from the “privacy” of our home PCs is far from secret, let alone what we log onto at work. Every time you visit a Web site, tracks are left on your hard disk in the form of cookies, history files, and cache files.

Now, these are not all bad. Cookies let a Web site recognize you the next time you log on. That’s how your online bookstore or bank recognizes you each time you visit its site. History files log your recent surfing, so you can quickly rediscover a site. Caching, meanwhile, holds temporary copies of the Web pages you’ve visited–they are what you see when you retrace your steps by clicking the Back button on your browser.

The problem is those clues are there for your coworkers to view too. More worrisome, the Internet is a backdoor into your computer, and snoopers can retrieve data while you’re online. Internet Cleanup does a thorough job of removing Web trails as well as scouring your hard disk of Web site downloads such as ActiveX controls and plug-ins. And even if you don’t care who knows where you’ve been, do you want your hard disk slowly cluttered and filled by months of accumulated Web debris? The package will tidy things up and liberate disk space. You can set cleanups for specific times of day, as well as choose to leave certain cookies untouched. After all, you might want your bank to recognize you when you come calling.

Ontrack has a solid background in PC utilities packages to fix, tune, tidy, and generally speed your PC, and Internet Cleanup does its job. It even resisted the attempts of even the renowned Norton Utilities UnErase program to retrieve shredded files. –John Rennie