I am requesting assistance of computer savy folks I am.

[Kit Carruthers]

Okay, so, uhhh...

Say somebody broke into my parent's house and created a document on my dad's computer. Would there be any way to trace... anything?

I'm pretty sure the document would have been created on the computer, and then had the text copied from another source, but I guess there's a possibility the whole document was typed up on his computer too. I kind of doubt the document was just copied over but I guess that could also be a possibility.

Would there be any record of what discs/external drives were plugged into the computer or anything like that?

[Magik]

Re: I am requesting assistance of computer savy folks I am.

What document is it? 0.o?

This sounds so cryptic. And Rob, I want to chat with you so you need to get online more often... at three in the morning, when I do.

[Patryn]

Re: I am requesting assistance of computer savy folks I am.

It kind of depends on what operating system the computer's using, and how computer savvy the computer's owner is.

The obvious things, assuming it's Windows, it's possible there may be a link through Documents on the Start Menu, though if it was saved on an external drive that was plugged in, it wouldn't open but you would bring up an error message indicting that Drive whatever isn't available (now if someone wanted to purge that list, simply go to the start menu and choose settings->Taskbar & Start Menu->Advanced and then check the Purge Recent Documents button (next to the trash icon). If you used Word, odds are that it would also show up on recently used documents.

External drives won't show up once they've been properly ejected.

If you copied and pasted, and haven't restarted the computer or recopied something else, when you choose paste what you previously copied would show up. It's also possible that it may be on the clipboard (though I don't really use that).

This is all assuming that the document wasn't saved on the HD and only involved opening up Wordpad, Notepad, or Word. If any other program is involved (especially a browser) then the trail gets larger.

Now if there's a keystroke logger on the computer (which is highly unlikely unless the computer owner is super paranoid, pretty savvy to know they exist, and then go buy one), then you have to figure out which one it is, use the special command to make it actually show up, and then purge the log.