Where are photos stored?

This sounds like a silly question but here goes:

I bought my wife an HP computer with Windows 7. Unfortunately I had to buy the floor model because they were out of these. I wanted to find the best computer I could find as a Christmas gift. They gave me a 10% discount on the computer so I took it.

I asked the salesman if he could make the computer appear like it was new. In other words get right of any traces that it was a floor model. All he did was delete the store user account. We apparantly he didn't get rid of all traces.

Well there are about eight photos stored on this computer. If you click on:

Computer, then Downloads it pulls up about 8 photos of someone's cruise ship vacation. If you pull up the photo, the dates when "captured" go back to last January. However if you right click on the properties, all of these photos were created on Decemeber 9th with a few minutes of each other, about a week before I bought the computer and they are all stored in:

C:\Users\Admin\downloads

My theory is because this computer was a floor model someone had downloaded some photos off a webpage like Facebook or they were stored there when they pulled up their webpage.

I know with previous versions of Windows, IE stores photos in a temporary directory but I'm not sure about Windows 7. But I'm thinking someone actually had to goto the trouble of saving these photos by right clicking on a photo then select save.

My wife thinks that someone purchased this computer and returned it and the store just put it back out on the floor. I'm thinking these photos came from someone surfing the internet while the computer was on the floor.

I called the store and talked to the manager. He says if someone returns a computer for any reason, they always send it back to their warehouse and never place it back out on the floor or try to pass it off as a new computer.

He said he would exchange it but he didn't have any new ones at the time and he is not sure if HP is going to make anymore of these PCs in this particular model.

What do you think about this?

 

You might want to look at this web site from Microsoft Answers:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7pictures/thread/378c8df9-7907-43e2-a097-99e4f61fca09

Also - I would ask the wife if she liked the PC and what her opion would be. As you state "I bought my wife an HP computer ".

 

Well she likes the computer itself but she just thinks it was used and someone brought it back.

But so far eight photos is all the evidence there is that someone used it. Like it said it was a floor model and anybody could have done anything while it was there but she asks, "why would anyone download their cruise ship and wedding photos to this computer ". So I don't have an answer for that.

 

Someone may have used their camera memory card on it to see if it worked or...

A salesman may have shown somebody how a memory card reader works, using the card they brought with them or...

A salesman may have shown a customer how to get picture off the camera they had bought, used but hadn't been able to figure out how to download from or...

Someone wanted to double check some pictures on a memory card before getting prints made or...

...well, the possibilities are virtually endless given the strange ideas people can come up with, especially when dealing with computers!