wipe my computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter kristy
  • Start date Start date
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kristy

i am getting ride of my old computer and whont to cleen off everything that
is on it so no one can see what was on it
 
Hi Kristy,

There are several tools available on line that will allow you to wipe a disk
clean before formatting and installing a new OS. They are fairly safe in
erasing data beyond the ability of most data recovery tools, but be aware
that there are forensic drive tools that will allow for data recovery from
all but a drive that has been smashed to pieces. It's a matter of the degree
of safety you want.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
 
i am getting ride of my old computer and whont to cleen off everything that
is on it so no one can see what was on it
Click to expand...


It all depends on how paranoid you want to be. Simply deleting a file
often leaves it possible for someone to recover it, but they have to
actively want to and try to do this. Because that's a rare occurrence,
just deleting it is probably good enough for most people.

If you want to do more, there are freeware/shareware programs
available that will overwrite the data, one or several times. That
makes it much harder to recover anything.

It's important, however, to recognize that there is *no* way to be
sure that nothing recoverable remains. Even overwriting it multiple
times isn't necessarily good enough; there are sophisticated (and
expensive) techniques that can often recover even overwritten data.
For that reason, the US government destroys drives containing
sensitive data in a furnace, rather than relying on overwriting.

But if you're not an international spy, you probably don't have data
that warrants that kind of treatment. I'd either just delete it, or
use one of the overwriting programs I mentioned above. Google will
find you several choices.
 
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