Free PC Cleaners
Want to give our grandson old laptop & would like to clean the hard drive & delete files,What would be the best way to go about it?Thanks
Forum Discussion
hermandutchman wrote:K Charles wrote:Our local TV just did a program about this. They purchased a PC at a garage sale, that was supposed to have been cleaned out.
Take out the hard drive and smash it with a hammer.
A computer expert took out the hard drive and was able to tell almost everything that had been on computer. He said the only way was to use large hammer on hard drive.
The seller likely just deleted files or may have even reformatted the hard drive, but this does not eliminate the possibility of recovering data. Info about users activities can also found in the registry, temp files, and browser history/cache. You must over write the the hard drive space to make deleted files impossible to recover for all practical purposes. But really only need to over write the space on hard drives only once. Multiple write passes is not necessary in modern hard drives, and largely an urban myth that doing so decreases the chance of data recovery in any way. Not to mention, wasting time. In fact, you'll find published research on this myth on the net.
