[W126 Coupe] Off Topic - computers

[Josh Allen]

Jonathan wrote:

> Mister McGoo wrote:

>> Quick question for the world.

>>  

>> I am going to be giving my computer away (3 years old, XP) and want 

>> to know of any of the "cleaners" (Window Washer, Discscrubber, etc) 

>> actually DO prevent future access to all the "deleted" files on the 

>> hard drive, or are they scams?  Does anybody have any recommendations?

>>  

>> -Bellamy

Depending on how much you want to make sure things aren't retrievable, 
you can also take the hard drive and drill a hole through the platters 
like the military is known to do for some applications.

It tends to shatter the glass substrate in the disks, so no data 
extraction. 


On the less physically destructive side, you might check 
http://dban.sourceforge.net/ for the open source secure deletion tool.  
This one seems to use a random number generator to overwrite with blocks 
of random data.

-Josh