franktee said:
Upon passing a computer on to someone else, will a clean install
safely remove all personal information from the harddrive or will a
third party remedy be needed.
There is no simple answer. It depends on how paranoid you want to be.
Realize that no matter *what* you do, there is always a remnant of what was
written still present on the disk, and using sophisticated techniques, a
determined invader can sometimes recover it.For that reason, the US
government doesn't rely on any software techniques to
destroy really sensitive data, but physically melts the drive in a furnace.
Most of us don't need that kind of security. Depending on what is on the
drive, and recognizing that most people will neither know how, nor want to
bother trying, to recover any old data on the drive, a simple format and
reinstall is sufficient for most people. And for the enormous majority of
people a zero-fill utility is more than sufficient. If it were me, I
wouldn't go any further than that, but only you know what is on the drive
and how much someone else might be interested in it.
If you want a zero-fill utility, there are several downloadable choices that
Google will find for you. There probably isn't any particular reason to
prefer one of them over the others.
