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.

What You Should Do Before Selling Your Computer is a post from: Computer File Recovery

Like any kind of situation out there, the practice to preventing danger is to avoid it all together. So to avoid having to use computer file recovery or hard disk recovery software start putting some of these practices to good use.

1 ) When you start working on your file, whether it be a text document or excel, or any kind of file, you should start the file, than save it immediately. Once saved you will need to know the path to the file because you will be using command prompt. To make this easy on yourself. Simply navigate to the folder where your file is and open that folder. Keep that window at the forefront and when you open command prompt you should see that is already has you in the correct location. From there type "attrib +s filename" without the quotes. Filename should be what you called your file. The full command for this is "attrib +s filepath\filename" What you are doing is making that file a system file. Your system won’t actually use the file, but it will make it so it’s undeleteable. Update to this….If you right click on your file and go to file properties you should see a checkbox where you can set it’s properties…ie..make it undeleteable or make it a system file. Much simpler. This only applies to versions after Windows 98, I believe.

2) I know this may sound prehistoric, but before you actually empty your trash bin, open it up first and look in it. Make sure there’s no files you want to delete. I’ve saved many files I’ve accidentally thrown away by this method. It’s manual, takes a few seconds, avoids any issues with hard drive recovery and well worth the effort.

3) There are programs out there you can install that give you the ability to "secure erase" What these programs actually do, is once you delete a file it will ask you if you wish to secure erase that file. If you say yes, it will delete the file, mark where the file is located on your disk sectors and then start writing a bunch of nonsense to that area. Usually just random letters and numbers. Then it will delete that space again, then it will continue once more with the randomness then finally delete that space again. It’s pretty effective. Unless you are criminal trying to destroy information or you’re selling your computer you really don’t need this. So avoid using Secure Delete programs when necessary. If you do use it, the chance of you ever recovering your files again will be pretty dim.

4) Create User Accounts. A lot of files and folders go missing because someone else had something to do with it. Create as many user accounts as you need. Making yours the only one with admin permissions. Always log off, and never let anyone use your account.

Best Practices to Avoid Accidentally Deleting a File is a post from: Computer File Recovery