Don't give your old computer away before reading this

It's always exciting buying a new computer. You can't wait to set it up and put its power to use. Of course, it often creates a problem: What do you do with your old computer?
You could turn it into a second Internet computer, DVR or a streaming media server. But you're more likely to sell it or give it away to a friend or family member.


That's fine, but you don't want to sell or give away your personal data along with it. Who knows where it might end up!


Unfortunately, you can't just place your sensitive files in the Recycle Bin and then empty it. This doesn't completely delete the files. It just hides them from the operating system until they're overwritten. Anyone with the right tools can recover them.

Read more: 3 simple ways to delete your data for good | Fox News

bashed the crud out of mine with a hammer great tool for anger release

Thanks for the info Christian Guy, I have an old one and I wasn't sure what to do with it, this will help. And maybe bashing it with a hammer is the way to go, lol.

Bashing computers with hammers is always fun so is shooting it.

Another thing to watch out for is copy machines. Most copy machines (think doctors offices, police departments, kinko's, etc...) actually have built in hard drives that keep a copy of every item scanned through it. These doctors, police, kinkos' or other businesses sell these copiers once they get old. People will purposely buy used copiers hoping to find information on the hard drives that will be useful or even help them make money. Most of theses companies aren't even aware of the hidden hard drives.

Used our's for target practice, Im not bad with a bow and arrow.

God bless
pickles

There are different freeware utilities available that completely wipes a hard drive, so enabling you to sell it on, i.e., DBAN, Eraser, Killdisk and so forth, you can find more of these utilities in the Partition/HDD Backup/Management section...