hey guys,


want to sell my laptop but being a poker player i have all kinds of programs and such on it and that probably poses some sort of security risk when i resell it. is there a way to erase ALL history of me on the hard drive? am i being paranoid and will just removing all programs be enough?

you're not being paranoid

at a minimum, you need to wipe the harddrive with a multipass erasing program then reinstall windows.

cool, ty.

using killdisk right now, ty for heads up.

btw, i nuked EVERYTHING on the hard drive(dellutility/recovery/os c/ etc), i assume this was the correct way to go about this?

As long as you can reinstall the OS that's fine.

The free version of killdisk just erases with zeros in a single pass. That's probably good enough to keep yourself secure from most people.

If you're super paranoid you can use DBAN for a multi-pass with a random number generator [1s and 0s].

and then if u want to be really sure, use a prog like http://www.recovermyfiles.com/

to make sure it all worked

and then if u want to be really, really sure, use a hammer.

Prolly hurt the resale value tho.

i used the pay version to be safe.

I would not have nuked the second partition if there was one. The partition where it comes with d:/recovery where you can reinstall windows from the hd. Other than that, yeah, nuke it all. Not a big deal if you did nuke that partition though.

How would wiping everything out with zeroes have the possibility of still allowing file recovery?

desktop software probably could never get it, but a clean room w/ the proper equipment could.