is there any way to use a command prompt to show me any hidden programs that are hiding on my computer? im under the influence that my parents have installed a program on our computer and are now watching everything that i do, is there any way to prove\disprove this?
I don't know if you're still checking this post, but I can second ultimatum's recommendation from DewaSoft. Permit me a second on my soapbox, and I can give you a few more tips as well (and all subsequently mentioned utilities are free, most portable as well). Firstly, if you are an avid user of Facebook, your parents should be the least of your concerns. Facebook collects (and leaks) massive amounts of data to the public (
http://lifehacker.com/#!5526429/see-what-facebook-publicly-publishes-about-you), and it collects this information even when you are browsing other sites (there are plugins for Firefox for example, for preventing this...)
Have you considered just asking your folks how they knew? Sometimes the best way to get a direct answer, is to ask a direct question... Unless your parents are quite sophisticated computer users, they could have simply discovered traces left behind in your browser cache, perhaps without intending to snoop. I don't use Facebook, but without seeking to do so learned which friends my wife had been chatting with over the period of about a month, as I had
Google Picasa running and it began asking for identities on a number of faces discovered in photos of our friends I didn't recognize as part of our collection (it was grabbing them from her browser cache). My wife's personal correspondence is her business, so I try to remind her to clear her browser cache from time to time...
You could perhaps run a portable browser, or setup your browser to automatically clear cached information, and perhaps try running some of these utilities (
NIRSoft;
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/), which are generally really useful tools, to get an idea of the bits of information scattered around your system over time (there's a link somewhere in the page to get all the utilities together in one shot...). The search utility
Everything (
http://www.voidtools.com/) is also a fast way to locate files cached on your system, and the utility
CCleaner (
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner) is a great way to automatically clear them out... I probably don't have to mention that Picasa, while not designed for the purpose, is a great "forensic" tool as well. However, if you are convinced there is something really sneaky, you could try running
HiJack This!, and submitting the report to the forums...