I’ve read the above link about computer questions but I don’t see the answer.
I have just bought a new PC to replace my 5 year old Windows XP machine, I intend to give the latter to my dad and I was looking for advice on ‘cleaning’ the machine from all the stuff thats built up on it over the years so he has effectively a new machine.
Unfortunately I can’t do a complete hard-drive wipe and install as I don’t have the original XP discs anymore.
Any advice is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
If it’s just your dad, just go through your hard drive and erase all files you don’t want him to see. Then compress the drive by using a program like XP’s Disk Defragmenter program. If you feel like wiping the drive some more, just copy some large dummy files to the drive and then erase them again. There are also free programs out there that wipe files off the drive, but the above approach should be good enough for your dad.
meh…
if its going to your father for me I would simple delete the files, clear bookmarks and history, empty the trash, uninstall any programmes he won’t use / need and then do a defrag…
Cybercide is the product you want. www.cyberscrub.com
For a free program Eraser
Many of these XP install disks are basically identical, so you may be able to borrow one from someone – then all you need is your valid XP serial number to do a complete re-install of the OS.
And that really is the cleanest way to do it.
Boot and Nuke will completely wipe a system clean.http://www.dban.org/
Don’t forget to take a vaccuum to the innards 
No, that’s a bad idea. Using a vacuum will almost always generate a large static electricity charge. If that happens to discharge into a vulnerable part of the motherboard, it can do definite damage.
Clean out all the dust bunnies indeed, but not with a vacuum.
The only effective way to remove all data from a computer that you wish to get rid of and not have any information recovered is to remove the hard drive and burn it. Like in a fire. And not put it back in.
If you leave the hard drive in the computer and just try some kind of wipe, the information can still be retrieved. Even the so called ‘government wipe’ cleaners can still be read, by the goovernment of course!
I would never give away or sell a computer with the hard drive still in it.
Do this with caution, because there is no way to go back. I have tried to do this twice and failed to reinstall with the borrowed cds both times.
If you cant reinstall windows then uninstall any application that you own and will need to be transferred to the new computer. Delete any media files and other things you have stored. Empty the recycle bin.
Now create a new user account. Make this account an administrator. Log in with this account and delete your old account’s profile.
Once thats done, download and install the trial version of CCleaner. Run it and clean whatever it finds.
Now download a utility called sdelete.exe from Microsoft. Run it like so “sdelete.exe -z” This will wipe all the blank space so no one with an undelete utility can retrieve thing things you have deleted. This may take an hour or two.
Top it all off with a nice defrag and off you go.
>If you leave the hard drive in the computer and just try some kind of wipe, the information can still be retrieved.
Maybe, just maybe, the NSA with a scanning electron microscope can retrieve some parts, but a triple wipe or even a single zero’d out pass is more than enough.
There’s a famous bounty for any company that can retrieve data from a wiped drive. So far there have been no takers.
We had a company claim that their data destruction was superior to other products (such as DBAN) and that they “routinely recovered” data after a triple overwrite. I asked them if they’d be willing to back that up with a test which they confirmed. I sent them three hard drives, each one was first filled with multiple copies of one big text file (IIRC I used the complete works of Shakespeare on one drive, the KJ Bible on the other and War & Peace on the third) and then a standard 3x overwrite was performed using DBAN or the equivalent.
Never heard a peep back from them and I still use DBAN and Eraser around the office. Maybe those guys use extra strength 1s and 0s?
Paranoiac fantasies aside you are not talking about taking your PC full of sensitive military secrets and putting it on Ebay, you’re giving your old PC to your dad. You’d probably be fine just installing Windows fresh, doing a complete reformat in the process. That will give Pop a clean installation.
If you want to sleep soundly knowing that anything you had on the drive is unrecoverable, burn a copy of DBAN (they also make it bootable from a USB thumb drive), boot up the machine from the CD, choose a 3x overwrite and let it run (depending on drive size and speed it will take a few hours).
Take out the boot drive, hit it with a hammer until it is destroyed. Install new boot drive and install the OS. This isn’t rocket science: if you don’t want data to go somewhere you can’t control, nuke it. With extreme prejudice. Hard drives are cheap, your data is not.
Really, it’s going to your Dad – why are you that paranoid about it? You must have some really nasty porn on that disk! Or your various plans for killing your parents & inheriting everything!
Thanks everyone!
I’m not really paranoid about him seeing what I have on it, its more just so that the PC is effectively ‘new’ and not clogged up with 5 years of the general detritus and stuff that a 5 year old PC picks up and slows it down.
I’ll use the advice mentioned, thanks again.