Cleaning the contents of a laptop
 

Just picked up a new laptop.

I want to clean the stuff off of my old one so i can give it to my younger sister to use for college etc..

What progams can anyone recommend that will do a clean sweep of it with out having to do a clean reinstall of vista?

good question. I want to do the same thing with an old desktop I have in the closet.

Reformatting is the best bet...:pimp

There can always be traces of things left behind. It isn't hard to format and reinstall windows which would be your best option.

just leave your porns on it for her to share while at college

reformat the damn thing is the only secure way....

Mainly just leave it full of DP and incest stories and I think you might find that your sister will be VERY grateful... or stab you.

i would put a new harddisk into it

Yah hard disk is the best way to go if you think someone will have the time and money to go and send your disk to find traces of what you may have left behind on your hard drive but if your sister doesn't have special software or equipment to look into your hard drive then i wouldn't worry about it.
Just destroy your old partition and format the hard drive after recreating a new partition. Then reinstall Windows and you should be fine or just install Linux as it's a different format system and will make it harder for people to find what you had in Windows.

Use this program for wiping disk:
http://www.dban.org/
(it requires to be installed as floppy or cd rom boot)and put gutmann method for erasing it.It will take time,maybe even entire day,but once is done,not even alien technology will be able to recover data.Beside that operation is good beacuse for some reason disk always works better after that.

i hear the delete button works wonders for deleting files

I have to ask... if you take it out and reformat it, is it still gay? :1orglaugh

just run a big magnet over the hard drive

pdwipe


...

Thank you for the suggestions :thumbsup

:thumbsup

sounds good

Format hard disk is always the best option in this case!

well then you hear wrong

that still leaves stuff behind...

...just for info
 

http://www.heidi.ie/node/14 (That links directly to the d/l for Eraser)

When 'deleting' files under Windows, the OS essentially just modifies the directory entry that refers to the data's location, the actual data itself remains intact. For the data to be 'securely' removed from the system, it has to be actively overwritten. There are security standards set by organizations like the NSA (the same people who brought us ECHELON) that basically require the data to be overwritten with 0's or 1's for a set amount of times in order for the data to become irretrievable.

Deleting and Formatting disks does NOT remove the data from a drive, and anyone with some skills, proper software, and a bit of time can retrieve the data.

Hope this helps...

a good old fashioned reformat

Deleting and formatting will not remove the files, only the pointers to the files. Anyone with access to the Internet and half a brain can recover every single file.

There are people and software that can even recover files that have been overwritten with zeros. I believe DOD now says that shredding the hard drive is the only valid way of making data unreadable. Short of that, here's a list of free tools. I have used Eraser before:

http://www.thefreecountry.com/securi...redelete.shtml

Just put in a new hard drive.

so whats better?

www.dban.org or http://heidi.ie/eraser/default.php

or anything else?