So you have just gotten your brand new Windows computer and want to clean up your old one and give it away. That is a nice thing to do for someone who may need a computer but isn’t able to afford a new one. But you are concerned about your personal information on that old computer.
Not that the new owner would actually look for your bank account numbers, but… Then you think about other information on your hard drive like social security numbers, usernames, passwords, etc. You still want to be smart in protecting your private information.
There are a couple of options. You could just give the computer away and tell the new owner to stay away from your personal "stuff." Not smart.
Next, you could select all of your personal information and delete the files. Hopefully you have placed all of your documents in your "My Documents" folder so you don’t miss any of them. Oh wait, what about your usernames and passwords recorded in your browser? Yes, you could also clear your browser’s cache to resolve that but have you missed anything? Also, not smart.
Some of you more "techie" readers may think, "Well, I will just reformat the hard drive to wipe everything or maybe fdisk it." Yes, fdisk is a real geek word; check it online if you wish. Nope, both of those will leave most of your data in a recoverable condition so for someone a little "techier" than you it would not present a problem.
What are you to do?
I suggest people use a program like "Active @ Kill Disk". KillDisk is free, powerful, easy to use software that allows you to completely destroy all data on your hard drive. The free version is good and will take care of most of your worries. That is unless you are going up against an IT person. The free version thoroughly deletes all of the data on the drive.
That sounds good; however, if the information wasn’t destroyed and written over by other data it could be "undeleted" by professionals. There is a pro version of KillDisk which offers many other options. It will allow the data to be deleted multiple times, i.e. rearrange the ones and zeros many times and writing "junk" data over it. If a deleted file has other files written over it numerous times it makes it much harder if not impossible to recover. You can even tell it to rewrite over the old drive up to 99 times to secure the deletions. The US government suggests seven overwrites is sufficient and the world authorities say that 35 times makes it impossible to retrieve, so 99 should be sufficient.
The program will run from a thumb drive or a CD. Since you will be deleting everything on your hard drive it cannot run from your computer. There is a "wipe" portion of the program which will totally destroy all of the deleted files on your computer and leave the rest of the data alone. You can run that portion from your hard drive.
The pro version of KillDisk costs about $50. If you don’t want any secret government organizations to retrieve your personal information it may well be worth the price.
This eliminates any possibility of future retrieval of deleted files by anyone else.
