There comes a time when everyone has to say goodbye to their old PC. Personally, I don't get all attached to my PC's because I know in about 2 years, out they go. Whether you are taking the PC down to the recycler, giving it away to a charity or selling it, you might not know this, but it is very risky to just hand over your PC to someone else. "Why," you ask?
Well, in this day and age, you've probably heard of identity theft. After a couple years of usage, our PC's gather up a lot of information about us - and that can be dangerous if the information falls into the wrong hands. "But I've deleted all of my files," you say. There are plenty of software tools out there that can help someone "undelete" files - even if you formatted the drive! Also, you might not remember where you saved all of your files. So I'm hoping you can see the reason for wanting to clean your PC before getting rid of it.
What you really want to do is "wipe" your drive. This is done by software that writes 1's and 0's repeatedly on your disc - effectively wiping the drive clean of all files by overwriting them with the random patterns of 1's and 0's. Even the government and military have certain requirements for wiping a drive clean, as you can imagine.
I personally use PGP software to wipe my drives before I get rid of them, but there is far less expensive software available for this. In fact, you can find a tool called Secure Erase here for free. You just download the zip file and read the text file included for instructions.
If you are giving away your PC to charity or to someone else, you might want to restore the PC (see my blog post on this) after you wipe it so the person or organization to whom you are giving it will have a nice clean PC ready to use.
No comments:
Post a Comment