General stupidity

H

howthehellshouldiknow?

New Member
Hello all,

I have an old PC and I'm giving it to a friend. I think I saved anything any good to disc already. What should I do to clean it up before I get rid of it? (I should say, how?

Thanks.
 
^ Yes, especailly if you haev bought stuff offa the internet using it. It can store your credit card number and even your personal information. I suggest you get an 3rd party program to do it.
 
oscaryu1 said:
^ Yes, especailly if you haev bought stuff offa the internet using it. It can store your credit card number and even your personal information. I suggest you get an 3rd party program to do it.
Click to expand...

I had never thought about that. I will certainly remember it for future references.
 
just do a clean install of windows xp. reformat and reinstall. then charge your friend for the computer your giving him :-p
 
Yes it will wipe the drive clean as if its new, you put in the restore or windows disk in and restart then follow instructions.
 
GUYS!! Everyone should know this!!

Even though a reformat SEEMS to erase everything, sorry to tell you it doesn't. There is still stuff on that HDD that can be used for bad things. Let me just give you an example, if someone had access to file recovery that booted from a Linux kernel they could easily pull info from that drive and burn it to a disc, then open it in Windows. It's not rocket science... And yet most ppl, don't think it's possible, :rolleyes:
 
Formatting doesn't delete everything from the drive, not the way you'd want it to if you're selling the machine/giving it away... you'll want a program that'll write zeros to every sector on the disc, then you can choose to format the drive to NTFS, or just pop in your Windows install disc and that'll format it for you as well.

I use Western Digital Lifeguard Utilities, which works on every drive I've tried.
 
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