Do traces remain?

[Tuscan]

I use a work laptop but wish to spend my commuting time using it to write up personal letters of correspondence, compose CVs etc. I intend to access the documents from a floppy or pendrive. Does anyone know if traces or copies of the documents remain (and are therefore retrievable) on the laptop even after I remove the media?

[qapmoc]

Well if you only use the removable media for saving then the data should not appear anywhere on the laptop tha someone could normally access it,
However, windows has a swap file which uses space on the hard drive to temporarily store anything which won't fit in memory when it is working, this file is continually overwritten and its size changed as windows puts stuff in and out of the swap file. It might be conceivable that your data stays in the swap file when windows shuts down.
Try reading this for details on how to wipe the swap file when you shut down windows, note that you must make a normal shutdown for this type of thing to work.

[ursula62]

Never work directly onto a floppy drive when using Word. Word uses lots of temporary files and if it doesn't have room for them it may overwrite the data on the floppy disk to make space.

You should be OK using a memory stick though, unless it's a really huge document.

[LeMarchand]

In addition, the names and locations of the documents will probably be in Windows' "Most Recently Used" list. You should be able to delete these manually, but there are a number of (free) third party solutions that will do it for you - either on request or automatically at start up. I use CCleaner at the moment.

[Tuscan]

Many thanks for the help everyone and especially the link qapmoc. Cheers.