Cleaning a PC prior to disposal

cornerstone13

Hello,

We bought a PC last week from Tesco which is faulty and they are replacing it and taking the faulty one away.

I would appreciate some advice on how to be sure that I don't leave any personal data on the PC. I know about the obvious data (docs, pictures etc) which I'll move onto an external hard drive and then delete. We use Outlook and I've discovered about the .pst file and will copy and remove that and also clear the cookies from IE and Firefox - will that be enough to ensure our online banking details are removed, for example.

Is there anything else that I should be "cleaning" and/or transferring - the PC is Windows 7 with MS Office 2010.

Many thanks

rdpro

a system restore should be sufficient after removing personal data.

iamcornholio

Format the hard disk

buglawton

The real McCoy is to use Boot and Nuke http://www.dban.org/
As I do (before reinstalling Windows) when selling off any old computers.

Lil306

buglawton wrote: »

The real McCoy is to use Boot and Nuke http://www.dban.org/
As I do (before reinstalling Windows) when selling off any old computers.

buglawton has it correct

Reinstalling windows does not get rid of the data, you can recover the information with the correct tools

dban uses Government grade methods of guaranteeing no data 7 random 0 passes (or something to that affect)

Linbox

DBAN will totally wipe the disk - including the operating system. I would delete every thing you dont want including any browser logs and cookies, my docs,email progs and accounts etc. Get in to a saleable condition and then use some thing like http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/eraser_portable. Use it a couple of times and try to recover a file using an undelete prog

Delete all progies not wanted, all docs and then I would run the following in this order
CCleaner http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/
Spybot S&D http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
Malwarebytes http://www.malwarebytes.org/
JkDefrag/MyDefrag http://www.mydefrag.com/
Eraser http://www.filehippo.com/download_eraser/