Shoutbox

hi i am selling my pc...... do you know when you delete some thing some of your stuff is stord on you hard drive and you can recover it eg like the police do when they take you computer. is there a softwear which i can delete every think and it can not be recovered by any one not even the police....

Are you selling your computer to the police?

Anyway Ashampoo WinOptimizer is a great program that not only allows you tweak setting, clean the pc, tweak transparency, split files and join files, but it also allows you to wipe files permanently. Its is a great program. I personally use WinOptimizer 4

Yeah, if you're selling it to any "average joe", you really don't need to worry about people retrieving your old files, as i doubt they know how to do it anyway

but if you're giving it to the police, you deserve to be found out through stupidity

I loved Ashampoo stuff until I realised that most of it's functionality can be found in free software.

shred on Linux and Unix systems is extremely powerful, but it's command line, and I can't find a GUI Windows version. This looks like it's free and Windows and what you're looking for.

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Originally posted by Oxy
Yeah, if you're selling it to any "average joe", you really don't need to worry about people retrieving your old files, as i doubt they know how to do it anyway

but if you're giving it to the police, you deserve to be found out through stupidity

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just like Oxy is saying, i wouldn't be worry about people ''trying'' to recover your data and even knowing how to.  when i really worry about my data, i don't delete it, i keep the hard disk and get other (it's really because i can get very inexpensive hard disk with some friends in a store) new or whatever and if i REALLY need to hide my information by deleting it, i destroy it but as you wish, if you just wanna delete a sell, you can even format your hard disk and use your windows XP  CD or whatever software you have to re-install it if you know how to do that, if you don't, you can also get more help in tech talk

what kind of information are you hiding? are you a spy or something

Edit: Don't worry about this if you are not selling it to the police

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Originally posted by bside
hi i am selling my pc...... do you know when you delete some thing some of your stuff is stord on you hard drive and you can recover it eg like the police do when they take you computer. is there a softwear which i can delete every think and it can not be recovered by any one not even the police....

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Do a low-level format with three (or more) passes and the HDD should be safe to give away.
Either look on your HDD vendor's site, some provide tools to format the HDD. Or use a specialized application like KillDisk which supports several different methods to format the HDD.

But probably the safest way to erase your HDD is to destroy and burn it You can buy a new one or sell the computer without a HDD.

Format...

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Originally posted by MerK
and if i REALLY need to hide my information by deleting it, i destroy it

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Even a HD that has been smashed to little bits and burned was still able to have 90% of it's data read

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Originally posted by SpunkyLoveMuff

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Originally posted by MerK
and if i REALLY need to hide my information by deleting it, i destroy it

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Even a HD that has been smashed to little bits and burned was still able to have 90% of it's data read

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this isn't a SF movie ...

A HDD smashed to bits and burned can not be read again, certainly not 90%, even not by the cleverest hightech forensic people.

As andrey correctly pointed out, a 3-pass low level format is more than sufficient if you want to sell your PC (HDD) to someone else.

A normal quick format is not sufficient though. Everybody who can download from the internet can easly use one of the gazillions of available recovery programs to recover a HDD with is formatted like that. Then again, who would bother to do that....

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
this isn't a SF movie ...

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It was on some news website when I was in school a few years ago