With the advent of Windows 8 many PC users are thinking they might treat themselves to a new PC rather than simply upgrading the one they’ve got. That obviously leads to the question of what you do with the old PC, and giving it away or selling it – at least to anyone outside your immediate circle of family and friends – could be risky if you leave its hard disk in place.
You’d probably consider deleting your personal files from the hard disk (after copying them to the new PC, of course!), but an awful lot of information you’d regard as personal is stored in places you’re unlikely to find. Instead, then, you might think of erasing the entire hard disk, but that’s not easy to do either: you can’t erase a disk that’s actively in use, and while Windows is running, the disk is being used. There are applications which will erase data using “military algorithms” ensuring total destruction but these are expensive and not required very often so why would you buy them personally?
The only sure-fire way to ensure that the contents of your old hard disk can’t fall into the wrong hands is to remove it from the PC.
From there you have two options: one is to take it outside and do all sorts of aggressive things to it: attack it with a heavy mallet and/or force a screwdriver into it to make its internal disc impossible to read.
A much better option is to keep the old disk and use it. A technician could install it in your new PC’s case (if your new PC is not a laptop) in just a few minutes, and after ensuring you’ve copied everything you want from it, you could erase it and use it as extra space. Alternatively, you can buy a ‘disk caddy’ that you install the old hard disk into, and then connect it to your new PC via a USB cable.
Yes, this means you’d be handing someone your old PC minus a hard disk, but the new owner can easily have one fitted and what matters most is that you look after your own interests. Once that PC is out of your hands, you have no idea whose hands it will end up in, or what they’ll be able to find on it if they choose to go looking!
-----------------------------
