disk clean up

O

only1

Guest
hi i am selling my laptop as i need the money desperately. all of my personal
detail are on the hard drive credit card details ,phone numbers and sensitive
documents from work. does anybody know of a good disk clean up programme that totally wipes all of this information from my hard drive? I have heard that you can get them from the internet (sometimes on a free trial which would be ideal as i only need to use it once!) but does anybody know of one that ensures my details cannot be retrieved? I am putting it in the buy and sell so i need to be absolutely certain my details are permanately deleted.

Thanks in advance...
 
Another way is to format the disk & reinstall the o/s, but only do this if you know what you are doing.
 
If I was selling on a PC then I would definitely follow BlueSpud's line. For example the Ultimate Boot CD has some free disk wiping utilities which you can use before you reinstall the OS.
 
is regarded as one of the best in the field.

Even after a format ( + reinstall), data can be read from the drive using professional tools (though you have to be very unlucky for your laptop to fall into the hands of serious criminals!).
 
Would you need to do a multi-wipe? You know the way if you delete files from a pc, you can still retrieve them with the likes of getdataback etc..
 
Another useful link:

[broken link removed]

As I mentioned above - if it was me then I would definitely wipe and reinstall but I would not get too paranoid about people attempting to retrieve my data after that.
 
You could try System Mechanic. It has good software for many things including for destroying all traces of a file by right clicking on it and it can also write random bits to the empty spaces on the drive to US government standards and beyond.

They have a 30 day free trial here

http://www.iolo.com/sm/7/std/download.aspx

If you had a desktop I would suggest you sell it minus your old drive and keep the old drive for data storage as I find you can never have enough storage. Its easy to buy a cable from EBAY so you can read and write to the drive external to a new PC or to get an external housing for it.
 
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