How to view history on a computer: a detailed guide

It may be necessary to view the history of visiting various sites for many reasons: for example, there are doubts about those web resources that a child or spouse regularly visits. Or just a very curious article or a culinary recipe turned up on the Internet, but they forgot to add it to the Bookmarks. Then the knowledge of how to view the history of visiting sites on a computer will come in handy.

It doesn’t get easier

There is an extremely easy way to open the visit log. It works in absolutely all browsers, from the most well-known to the most exotic – the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + H. If this seems too simple, you can try the following:

1. Internet Explorer. It is enough to press the button in the form of a five-pointed asterisk in the upper right corner.
2. Opera. "Tools" menu, "History" option.
3. Mozilla Firefox. Select the "Log" tab, then the "Show all log" option.
4. Google Chrome. You need to click on the “three stripes" icon located in the upper right corner and select the “History” item in the menu that opens.

A more complicated way to view the history on a computer is to view the DNS cache. You can get to it in the following way: go to the "Start" menu, click "Run", then enter three Latin letters cmd in the address bar. A command prompt will open, in which you need to type ipconfig / displaydns and press Enter. After that, a detailed list of visited sites will be shown.

A slightly more complicated way to get to what you’re looking for

To view the log files directly, you must first make the secret explicit: call the control panel, in the "Tools" menu located at the top, select the "Folder Options" option and the "View" submenu. At the bottom, you need to put a bird in front of the words "Show hidden folders and files."

1. Where is the history stored on the computer if using IE: C:Users/User/LocalMicrosoft/Windows/History/index.dat. You can view index.dat with the Index.dat.Analyzer program.
2. Opera carefully stores secrets in global_history.dat, which is opened by Notepad. Its location is C:Users/User/AppData/RoamingOpera/Opera.
3. Firefox stores a list of visited sites in the places.sqlite file, which is opened by the SQLite Manager program. Located in C:Users/User/App/Data/Mozilla/FireFox.
4. Google Chrome stores lists of visited sites in Histor y, Archived History, History Index files, which are opened by Notepad. Their location is C:Users/User/AppData/LocalGoogleChrome/User/Data/Default.

By locating and opening these files, you can get a clear picture of all visited sites.

How to find out who did what with the computer

To find out what programs were opened in the absence of the owner of the computer, you need to find the "computer" icon on the desktop, right-click on it and click on the "Manage" menu item. Next, select the "Event Viewer" menu and the "Windows Logs" submenu in it. They will give a complete picture of the time the machine was turned on and off, installed or removed programs and updates.

The second way to view the history of actions on the computer is to go to the Prefetch directory located on drive C in the WINDOWS folder. This directory contains a list of all programs launched during the day.

When reviewing browsing logs, it is important to proceed carefully, since the recovery of these files is extremely difficult.