I’ve mentioned different ways that “the man” can gain evidence from your computer, and ways to protect yourself. One way I mentioned was recovering deleted files from your hard drive, for that I suggested a couple of free hard drive secure wiping solutions. Another method of protection I suggested was full hard drive encryption, but if they have a warrant, you will be forced to give up your password so they can gain access.
To help protect against this, you can clear your virtual memory at shutdown. This isn’t a fool proof method, and it may even increase the time it takes to shut your computer down, but it is better than a sharp stick in the eye. I actually recommend this with the use of the other methods I already posted about.
1) In Windows, click on Start > Run, then type in regedit (or regedt32) and click OK
2) Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
3) In the right pane, you should see a value called ClearPageFileAtShutdown, right click on it and select modify.
4) Change the data value from 0 to 1
5) If that option isn’t there, you can create it by right clicking in the right pane, and selecting New DWORD value, name it ClearPageFileAtShutdown and set the value to 1.
6) Reboot your computer to let the changes take effect.