What You Should Do Before Selling Your Computer.
A friend of mine sold a laptop about 2 years ago, deleted the hard drive and reinstalled
the system, so none of his files were showing. He then put his laptop up for sale. It sold, and about a month later he’s finding miscellaneous charges on his credit card, and about a month after that he found someone had tried to purchase a car in his name. Thankfully they caught the person right then and there while trying
to purchase a car because after the credit card incident he hired a credit protection company, and his name was on an alert. So he was very happy UNTIL he found out the person who was committing the identity theft was the person he sold his laptop to. When the "bad man" brought the computer home he simply connected it via usb to another computer and used the computer my friend sold him as an external hard drive. From there he used a computer file recovery program to look for various or "typical" words used for personal finances. He found what he was looking for then he proceeded to use a hard drive recovery program to get as much information from the
laptop as he possibly could, and again, He succeeded. I wish he would of brought his computer to me first before selling it! Lesson Learned!
Avoid what my friend went through! Before you sell your computer don’t assume that just because you delete your files and reinstall the OS that all the data is gone. It’s still there residing in unallocated space on your hard drive, you just can’t see it without the proper data recovery software.
Here’s my solution. Before you sell your computer, hook your computer up via usb or firewire to another computer. Then use a Secure Delete program. There are many to choose from. Use it on the entire hard drive of the computer you plan to sell. It will take a couple of hours for the entire process to finish. Secure Delete will erase your data, then write on that exact space on your hard drive. Then it will delete again, and then write over it again, and possibly it will do it a third time. Trust me, by the time it’s done no computer file recovery program will be able to recover a single thing because there’s nothing to recover but gibberish. Not code, or encrypted data, but complete nonsense. It won’t do a person any good. That’s a great thing. Now. Put your OS installation cd in the computer, and simply direct the cd to install the OS on the external hard drive you just erased. Once it’s all done you will have complete peace of mind that all your personal data is safe and out of harms way.