I'am selling one of my computers how do i wipe everything off so the guy that buys it can't look at any stuff that was on the hard drive. cheers
Your card details and things might still stay on it. I wouldn't sell it. I saw a documentary saying the only way is to drill through the hard drive with a power drill. You won't be able to sell it unless you get it checked first.
reinstall windows which will put it back to the day you bought it. if you,ve got a disc put it in and follow the prompts
RE: reinstall windows which will put it back to the day you bought it. There'll still be stuff on there if they have the software to look at it
**** me if the person buying isn't all that smart, just format it and sell it on. it is advisable to put a hammer to it though
Formatting a hard drive using windows will only reserve the data on the hardrive to be over written by windows the next time you save any data, so any personnal info will still be accessible by someone with the right software. The only way to make sure it is deleted is by buying a data cleansing software or distroying the hard drive.
True but i dont think he's trying to protect top secret data. If all he wants to do is get rid of private stuff then a format and reinstall will suffice. If you do format then make sure you remove any partitions as well.
Quite a few PC manufacturers have a "Restore to factory settings" option Dell for example definitely do and I think most other major manufacturers do as well On XP you just tap F11 during boot and follow the instructions - on Vista is more involved and you need the disks I suspect other computer models have similar Once you have done that you might want to fill up your disk again with rubbish and then delete it so that you overwrite all the previous data. ( or you could do this firs) That should be enough for selling domestically - Its still possible to get data with advanced techniques but unless hiding very illegal activities and the Rozzers get it you should be fine
NEVER sell a computer with the hard drive in it Either advertise it without one, or buy a cheap one that's blank. There's loads of free software that will recover deleted files.
