Im selling my cpu and have a question

[matthew52303]

what should i do as far as erasing memory or my personal information before i sell it. is there any way to restore to the default settings for everything. any help would be appreciated.

 

[Kage]

If your only selling your CPU, there won't be any information to delete.

If your talking about the entire PC though, there isn't really a sure way to delete everything, but I'd format it of course first, and then I think there are programs that will erase all data by changing the 0's and 1's to something unrecognisable on the entire drive, though I'm not sure how this would cost you.

For the standard user, just a format should be fine, as msot wouldn't figure out how to get back anything.

Though, if I sold a PC, i'd buy a cheap 40-60gb drive, and keep the drive you had in the computer originally so there is nothing to find.

 

[matthew52303]

Maybe I can make my question a bit more clear. I am selling my desktop to buy a notebook. I am selling it on ebay so I have no idea who is going to get it. I have never sold a computer before so I am not sure how this works. What do people usually do before they sell their computers? Thanks for the help.

 

[Kage]

Sorry about the last post.

Try this:

http://www.killdisk.com/

It looks free, and will completly delete the drive from within DOS, so its impossible to recover.

There is a professional version, and the only difference is, the free version doesn't use the "US Department of Defense 5220.22 M compliant" deleting method, but the free version should still be enough to make sure no one can get files back.

I hope this helps

 

[matthew52303]

Excuse my ignorance but im kinda new to this. What exactly will this do. I dont have anything important on my computer just mainly passwords and saved info on websites. Thanks

 

[dirtyoldman]

just do a reformat, if you are selling your windows with it just re-install it after the reformat, I can't remember every step of the process but if you search google for a reformatting guide then you should be able to write down the steps (it is quite easy once you understand)

 

[Kage]

You'll load that onto a floppy drive or USB device, and restart the PC.

Instead of reformatting it like you could do (wouldn't remove those files), this would wipe the entire drive, changing all the saved passwords that could be there and websites to useless 0's and 1's on the drive, making them unreadable to even the best hacker.

Your hard drive would then be able to be installed to as normal when the next person gets the computer, but with all your data gone

Its free too, so don't complain

 

[mammikoura]

Instead of reformatting it like you could do (wouldn't remove those files), this would wipe the entire drive, changing all the saved passwords that could be there and websites to useless 0's and 1's on the drive, making them unreadable to even the best hacker.

Actually I heard that there is one guy in India who can read stuff from those 0's and 1's. But then again that is just something I have heard so no telling if it's true or not.

But even if it is I doubt that he is the one who is going to buy ur computer.

Reformatting should be more than enough, though it seems that the program Kage told about does a better job.

 

[Kage]

Well 0's and 1's are data anyway, though organised in no way at all, like that program would do, it'd just be random data, and not documents, or programs, etc.

 

[TRDCorolla1]

I honestly think there is nothing to worry about. A simple reformat of the drive is all you need. I don't think people will take the time to retreive deleted or reformatted info. It would be kind of useless anyways. It's not like a top secret governement drive. Backup your sensitive files onto a USB thumb drive or whatever, and reformat the hard drive. I've given away plenty of my own used hard drives before. Even if they paid someone to rebuild the drive (which is very expensive), the info. would be in pieces anyways and won't guarantee to make sense half the time.