How do I wipe information before I sell my old laptop on Ebay?

JoanneC_2

My laptop starting smelling of burning rubber and not charging properley - it's three years old and would cost over 150 to fix so I've decided to buy a new one. I would like to sell my old one on Ebay - someone might be able to fix it themselves or they might want it for parts. My question is how do I wipe all of my personal information out of it? I have documents saved on it with my bank details and things and even though I've deleted them I'm worried that someone might be able to access it somehow.

chaddy7604

The only real way to secure your deleted bank details is to actually remove the hard drive before you sell it

albertross_2

For a general cleanup, delete all your personal files, 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 (including windows) unrecoverable:


http://www.cbltech.ca/data-shredder.html
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
both free. Overwrite 7 or more times.

JoanneC_2

Thanks for the advice but I'm a complete novice!! I've no idea what a hard drive is, let alone how to remove it!!!

albertross_2

JoanneC_2

Love the pictures!! I'll give it a go, it's already broken anyway!!!

moneysaver05_2

use kill disk you can download it for free.

wazza

albertross wrote:

If all else fails then use...

http://www.hardwarestore.com/media/product/271460_front200.jpg

emma0787

Do you have a reformating disk? That's what I've always used and it clears up the PC to how it was when you first bought it.

Word of warning though, you never get as much as you would expect for a computer when you sell them on, people just don't seem interested in buying second hand computers

wazza

Reformatting does not entirely erase the data on the harddrive so i have been told. It just puts a flag saying this hard drive is empty or where the data is now. with the right software it is posible to retreive information.

there is a program that writes 0's and 1's on the hard drive several times making it difficult to retreive the data afterwards