10Shooter wrote:Ldy AlliDu wrote:How do I get rid off OLD stuff, computer, cables, scanner and printer, thanks.
P.S. The drop-off Saturday at the park said they only took hard-drives, I did not have time.
Before you get rid of an old hard drive or computer, you need to make sure the data on the drive is impossible to recover. Frankly, data is almost always recoverable to some degree, but with the proper precautions you can at least make sure that Joe Shmoe who bought your hard drive from your garage sale can't access your Quicken financial information.
First, you should understand that deleting files, and even formatting your hard drive, are not sufficient. Both processes really just remove the information the hard drive needs to find the data, not the data itself. Deleted files can be undeleted and formatted hard drives can be recovered.
To be sure that your data is removed beyond all practical ability to recover it, you should use a wiping or erasing utility. These tools overwrite every sector of the hard drive with binary 1's and 0's. Those that meet government security standards even overwrite each sector multiple times for added protection.
http://netsecurity.about.com/od/quickti ... _drive.htm
Please, please do not donate without taking precautions of YOUR data.
I am speaking as an IT Professsional.