As far as trashing my old one: It’s a total peice of crap. Not sell worthy, so in the dumpster it goes. What I’m concerned about is, I’ve been told, A criminal with the right kind of savy, can go and yank my boards and get all kinds of personal info like credit cards, bank account, ect.
I know the chances are slim of this actually happening but what extra precautions can I take? (Other than a sledge hammer?)
As far as my new one. What precautions can I take from being infested with spyware? FWIW I already have a subscription to Macfee and plan on using NetZero as my isp. I also plan on using FF for my browser.
If you want to permanently destroy any data on the machine, it’s just the hard drive that you need to trash and there are a number of ways to do this, depending largely on how thorough you wish to be about it.
Repartitioning the drive with FDISK, then performing a full format will thwart casual data thieves.
After that, there are utilities that deliberately overwrite the entire disk many times with 1s and 0s in patterns and at random.
But even that won’t necessarily destroy the data beyond ALL hope of recovery; if you think there’s a serious risk that someone might actually employ expensive FBI-style data recovery techniques on the drive, then your best option would be to physically destroy it; dismantle the drive and attack the platters with a blowtorch, a grinder or with repeated blows from a hammer (wear gloves and eye protection) - if the platters are mangled beyond recognition, the data is gone.
But for most reasonable real-world scenarios, formatting the drive will be good enough - certainly it is a more secure way of protecting your data than you will be employing in other areas of your life.
As for spyware, I recommend Ad-Aware, and Spybot. You can google to find them, or try www.downloads.com. I run the two in conjunction, one gets what the other misses. Also, you can try the Microsoft spyware program. I’m not sure what the real tech people think of it, but I have no complaints with it. Microsoft AntiSpyware, is what it’s called, you can get that at the MS site.
Also, I’d recommend using a different browser other than Internet Explorer. I use Mozilla Firefox. From what I hear using a different browser will decrease the chances of spyware. Also, when surfing the net, be mindful of the plug-ins that could harm your comp. I’m not sure what ones they are, but if I go to a site where I’m prompted to download one, I’ll just close the browser and forget about it. If it’s from a trusted site, like MS Update, then fine, but if it’s some dodgy website that I’m not sure of, then I won’t bother.
Another idea - take the old hard drive out, put it in your new computer as a secondary harddrive, and then reformat it and you will have a nice blank drive for extra storage space.
To get rid of the data on the old drive, download a free program named Eraser and use it to make a “Nuke Disk”, which is a floppy that you boot from, and it contains a program that writes random data over the entire drive’s surface. This takes a while to run but effectively destroys all the data on the drive, for practical purposes nobody will ever be able to get anything useful off of it.
Alternately, using it as a second hard-drive in your new computer works too. And you can still use Eraser to wipe the drive if you want its old files all really gone.
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