What to do with old PC?

Kantankrus_Mare

We recently bought a new flat screened dell pc but are unsure what to do with our old one.

Tried wiping the hard drive so we could perhaps sell it but it won't wipe.

Was running amazingly slowly anyway so wouldn't burden someone with a crappy system.

Seems a shame to just dump it though? Would the monitor sell at a car boot sale? If so what do I do with the tower? Im thinking environment friendly disposal and am also concerned as it obviously holds a lot of our private info which I wouldnt want to get into the wrong hands.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

devizes18193

you stick in on freecycle or ebay ,offer it to a school , maybe take the hard drive out . you'd be surprised by how much of thepc's are old stuff

Contains_Mild_Peril

If you reformat the hard drive, that should delete everything (inculding the operating system of course, so if you don't have the disc you'd have to offer it without OS). If you erase anything personal, Freecycle is probably the easiest way to find it a new home. Even if you remove the hard drive altogether, someone who likes tinkering with things will probably take it.

albertross_2

For a general cleanup, delete all your personal files, delete all accounts/profiles, then run these one after the other (tick all the boxes).

http://www.ccleaner.com/
http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/clndisk.html

To completely wipe you hard disk, and make all data unrecoverable:


http://www.cbltech.ca/data-shredder.html
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

both free, create a boot floppy or CD, then boot from it and overwrite the hard disk 7 or more times.

Sooler

take the hard disk out and put in an external usb caddy, use it as a back up storage drive on your new pc

PiratePete

Unless you are prepared to pay a lot of money software deletion programs allways leave some data intact on hard drives. hard drives can be wiped by a very powerful magnetic source.....again not in the normal users domain.

Also just dumping old PC's at the local tip according to a recent program on BBC is asking for it as some councils sell these to agents who export them to Nigeria of all places !

I would recomend either removing the hard drive to use in another system as an extra drive or do as I do .......

1. Remove hard drive
2. Hit till flat or dissintigrated with a very large hammer !

CAT-THE-FIFTH

Try using these:

DBAN

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

or

Eraser

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/


If you have had sensitive data on the HDD I would keep it and get rid off the other bits!

Kantankrus_Mare

PiratePete wrote:

Unless you are prepared to pay a lot of money software deletion programs allways leave some data intact on hard drives. hard drives can be wiped by a very powerful magnetic source.....again not in the normal users domain.

Also just dumping old PC's at the local tip according to a recent program on BBC is asking for it as some councils sell these to agents who export them to Nigeria of all places !

I would recomend either removing the hard drive to use in another system as an extra drive or do as I do .......

1. Remove hard drive
2. Hit till flat or dissintigrated with a very large hammer !

Lololol:rotfl: quite like this idea.......will put it to hubby. Thanks

sandroad

Best thing to do to ensure that ALL you data is removed from the HD is to use KillDisk. This erases your HD by doing a low level format. The program is free and does not take too long.

Download it here.

You could also install Linux on that box to make it a Word Processing/Internet Browsing PC.

Skint1

Why don't you keep it to store your pictures, music, etc this will stop you clogging up your new PC .

trythat

Dban is good, make a linux server something like Ubuntu, or if the drive is the main worry, take the drive apart and have some nice shiney tea costers, albit with a hole in them. Just don't drop them on a hard floor as they shatter like glass