Exploring stuff on my old laptop. Need some help

[Fish]

Hey!

So for context: I have this absolute fossil of a laptop. OK its not that old but it was made back in the 2000s and runs pretty slow. Its an Acer Aspire One and I've had it since I was a kid. Anyways, awhile back I was able to get it running and it took some time but it was definitely worth it. Found some cute things like pictures of myself from way back and a screenshot from animal jam. Even took a quick picture of this



Ah memories 

I realized it would be pretty cool to see what I could find in the search history of this laptop, since I had barely used it for over a decade. I was hoping to find some old flash sites I used to visit (even if they didn't work anymore) and some other things too. I had a lot of trouble getting the search history of the old internet explorer browser though.

Does anyone have any tips on how I could do this? I hope its not impossible to get info from a decade back. Any and all help will be appreciated 
 

[vvinrg]

Oh wow, I haven't seen "WildTangent" in an age.

Mind giving the OS ver / IE ver? I'll poke around and see if the history is in some easily-parsed format.

[emeowly]

wildtangent and fate!! i played that game on my moms computer all the time. i remember it costing a token(that costed real money except we got a few free) to play so we left the game running for a few weeks at a time to get the most out of each token

[Fish]

Wild Tangent is where all the cool kids hanged out B) at least until all the free tokens ran out lol

Anyways my laptop is running on Windows 7 and is using IE10

[brisray]

Take a look in these folders:

C:\Users\<username>\Favorites
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temperory Internet files
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Recovery

there may be some information in those to see what you were looking at.

If you want to go all CSI with the laptop, see if there's anything worth restoring in the Recycle bin. Something like Recuva is still good at recovering files deleted out of the Recycle bin and not yet overwritten. There are others. A Hex Sector Editor like WinHex will try and read the entire disk no matter where the files are, if they've been deleted or not, if there's only file framents left, or who edited the files last.

As it's so old, if the laptop has trouble reading the disk, then a IDE PATA/SATA to USB adapter might be useful. These little devices are great if you work on different computers.

[Fish]

Take a look in these folders:
C:\Users\<username>\Favorites
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temperory Internet files
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Recovery
.

Ok so I followed what you said and was able to find some stuff! For context I was like 8 or 9 and I think what I found showed that lol

-Animal Jam stuff which makes sense that was one of my favorite games to play
-A website called Funbrain. Educational stuff that our teachers made us play during class but ig I liked it enough to play at home. I actually forgot about it till now
-A search for a Captain Underpants book I wanted. I think I was able to get it at the book fair but then lost it 
-Friv.com. That site makes up most of childhood I think lol
-I searched for the Poptropica DS game. I also played Poptropica a lot
-There was a search for an antivirus program which is still on the laptop sending me alerts about a billion viruses. Idk I think thats funny
-My mom used the laptop to watch some reality tv shows. Well I assume it was my mom because 9 yr old me wasn't really into the Real Housewives of Atlanta


Thank you for the help! I'm still gonna be poking around to try and find more stuff, so I'm still opened to any help

[brisray]

Happy memories! That is so cool that you managed to find that old stuff. Depending on your point of view, it's weird that computers hang on to so much stuff for so long, but sometimes it's useful.

It's not perfect because there's lots of things it can't collect, but if you want to see what some of these sites looked like around the time you visited them then there's the Way Back Machine on the Internet Archive. Just copy and paste the URL and it will find whatever it collected over the years.

Did you ever use other browsers like Firefox or Chrome? Those have their own history folders as well.

[Fish]

Happy memories! That is so cool that you managed to find that old stuff. Depending on your point of view, it's weird that computers hang on to so much stuff for so long, but sometimes it's useful.

It's not perfect because there's lots of things it can't collect, but if you want to see what some of these sites looked like around the time you visited them then there's the Way Back Machine on the Internet Archive. Just copy and paste the URL and it will find whatever it collected over the years.

Did you ever use other browsers like Firefox or Chrome? Those have their own history folders as well.

Yeah its so weird but so cool the way computers can hold onto stuff. In a way it felt like opening up a time capsule 

Way Back Machine is probably one of my favorite sites and im gonna try plugging some of the urls I found into it! I only ever used IE though so I think my search may be over at least for now...

[grubbyfox]

i hope you'll share some goodies with us!      either in the form of links, screenshots, etc. maybe you'll come across some lost media even!