Need some quick help.... Heads up this is about a Toshiba Laptop running Windows XP SP3.
I'm selling the thing locally to a guy, and was wondering of a good quick way to delete my personal information off of it. Anyone know of a free program that does it or anything like that?
Or should I just reload XP using the install disks that came with the lappy?
Thanks in advance!
Unless you use a special software that will do a military grade overwrite data can be recovered. Even from a formated HD. So if there is anything that you can go to prison for on your HD you should do a seious overwrite. I can't think of the name of it but there is a program that will do it for free out there.
Be aware that a military grade(7 passes) will take a long long time. Prehaps days.
@Joel406
Is this the one Darik's Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe and Data Clearing
That would be good, if you want to make sure everything is off of it.
Usually just formating the Drive and the re-formating and reloading the OS would also work.
Hope this Helps...
If you don't need to deep clean the HD or want to reinstall XP, then just create a New User or Computer Owner account and delete your named account(s) including its files.
Any personal programs you don't want to migrate to the new owner should also be removed in Control Panel.
Later the new owner can change the name on the replacement account you created if desired.
Wow thanks for all the help guys! Think I'll run some killdisk and then reinstall. Only a 20GB HDD so shouldnt take too long
Actually decided against Killdisk and even formatting. Just manually deleted everything I could find (wasn't much). One question though..... when looking at system info, the "Registered to: MY NAME" ....... any easy way to remove my name from there???
Click the link there to change name. I would put Computer Owner.
Did you remove your named User Account? This will remove all of your user files with it.
If you removed the files manually, then you can change User Account name to something like Computer Owner also.
New Owner can change these to what he/she wants.
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