Questions about giving my computer away

Ianna

Howday techies! I'm giving my PC away to a charity and don't know what to do to wipe everything on it. Do I need to delete everything one bit at a time?

fwor

Download and use DBAN:

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

penrhyn

There is software available to do this for you, simply deleting files does not remove the information from the drive.
If it were me I would remove the harddrive before donating it, new ones are cheap enough these days.
Then either keep it as a standby or take a hammer to it.

Psycence

Even taking a hammer to a Hard drive will not necessarily render it completely unreadable! You'd be surprised what you can retrieve from a seriously battered drive..

foreversomeday

Yes, but it's very unlikely anybody will bother.

tom9980

Vote for dban here too because its free and pretty simple to use.

Often charity's who recycle computers also can do this for you depending on who they are the charity i volunteer for use East-Tec DisposeSecure to wipe hard disks and charge £5 for the service but they also are contracted by local council's to do this as well.

pchelpman

And another vote for dban (if you need more assurance). It's the best at wiping hard drives because of the WAY it's done. The trusty ol' "military" style of "delete, write, delete again" repeated many times.