Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 7

You may not realise it, but Windows secretly stores a record of everything that you have done, from web pages and passwords to recently used documents.

Unless you manually delete this information, other people can see exactly what you have been up to.

Acronis Privacy Expert Suite aims to take the pain out of this task by automating the procedure. It will clear the recycle bin, delete temporary files or even wipe entire hard disks. Deleting files or private data in Windows will only mark them as deleted, leaving them physically imprinted on the hard disk, and with the correct tools they can be recovered. Privacy Expert stops this from happening by overwriting deleted files and settings with random characters.

The clean and friendly interface is very simple to use. Just double-click the relevant icon and the program will take care of the rest, although fine-tuning the software is quite difficult. Privacy Suite can use a variety of methods to delete files but the default setting is not guaranteed to securely wipe and changing the settings involves drilling through several menus.

Acronis has thrown in a couple of other tools, too. First is the Pop-up blocker. This stops annoying adverts and messages from spoiling your web browsing. However, there are lots of free tools to do this, such as Google's Toolbar. The same can be said of the Spyware Clean-up tool, which eliminates nasty internet applications that record details of your web surfing. The free version is Ad-aware.

Overall, Privacy Expert is a fairly simple utility that will keep your deleted files deleted, but it's only likely to appeal when you sell or give a PC away.

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