# 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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## DoubleHelix (Dec 10, 2004)

Yes, it's possible your company could know what you were doing. There are many programs that could do this. The computer is a company asset, and they have the right to monitor and record everything its used for.

I would strongly suggest you avoid doing anything on a company computer you wouldn't want management to know about.


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## tisa6363 (Sep 20, 2011)

I agree I shouldn't have done it - it's not something I'm proud of, just a moment of stupidity.

But is there any way I can get rid of all traces of what I looked at?


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## DoubleHelix (Dec 10, 2004)

I'm not comfortable helping someone coverup something like that. 

It's unlikely there's really anything you can do at this point anyway. Employee monitoring software is much more sophisticated these days. It's not like someone has to actually pick up your computer and look at it to find out what you were doing. 

Cross your fingers, and hope for the best. If you're confronted, contact a lawyer specializing in employment law.


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## Cookiegal (Aug 27, 2003)

I'm going to close this as it's not something that we wish to assist with.


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