Unfortunately I'm going to have to sell my trusty laptop in order to help me pay some bills.

I want to delete everything off my computer.

I have photos.
I have internet history.
I have MSN.
Online banking.
Personal finances.


I want to delete everything off my computer. A friend told me that just throwing it in the recycling bin won't just get rid of it and they can actually access MSN conversations and emails and passwords? And revive old photos.

Is this even true?

Well hope you can help.

Sarah

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mudweiser

Is this even true?

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Yes, but it requires a determined person. To absolutely, unequivocally eliminate all possible personal info, the drive should be wiped and the operating system reinstalled from scratch. The Hard Drive FAQ lists some drive erasure utilities.

That said, if you just delete all your personal data, clear your history lists, and then empty the recycle bin, data recovery/undelete software would be required to get anything back which may be sufficient depending on your paranoia level.

Well no need to answer the question! I don't need to delete anything anymore :)

I can keep my laptop!

Thanks for the help!

Sarah

Just for anyone who reads this topic based on title...

Nowadays, most laptops have a Recovery Partition that is used to restore the laptop back to the state it was in when it was first taken out of the box.

A really good Recovery Console will give you the option to:

1) Recover OS only (keep data)
2) Recover OS and Applications (keep data)
3) Restore whole computer (all data lost)

The 3rd option is the one that effectively reformats the partition and restores it back to pristine state.

The last couple of laptops I had had multiple ways to activate the Recovery Console. When first turning on the laptop pressing some Fkey (F10, F8, Delete.. ) might do it, or after booting you may find it listed in the Start menu somewhere.

After running the recovery from a recovery partition it is a good idea to use a multi pass wipeing utility to clear all open space on the drive. Deleting only erases the record of the file in the file allocation table and shows the space as free to the OS but it dose not erase the data several free utilities will recover these files. This will not clear your data it will however make recovery expensive enough that it will be out of reach of most people