Buraqina

Hello everyone, I'm new to the forum. My name is Laura and it's nice to meet you all :)

I decided to join as I'm looking for some advice. We've just bought a new PC, and obviously that means we're going to be getting rid of the old one. The question I have is that I've heard about all this "sensitive data" hiding in some secret place on your computer that nasty people can get hold of and exploit - so how should I go about that so I can have some peace of mind when we shift this old thing?

I looked up "wiping your PC clean" on google but I was a bit overwhelmed by the variety of answers I got. I did read about formatting your PC, but that requires reinstalling your OS as far as I can understand, and I don't actually have the CD for WinXP.
I do however have a 'Reload CD' that came with my PC which is meant to restore the PC to it's out-of-the-box condition apparently. It says it works as follows:

"A small area of your hard drive has been reserved to hold a copy of the Windows OS and all the software that was pre-loaded on the PC. This area is invisible to the user and so it cannot be deleted or overwritten. The copy has also been compressed so that it takes up as little space as possible. When you use the Reload CD the software on the hard drive is removed and replaced with the copy so that the software on the PC is returned to it's 'out of the box' state."

Would using this CD wipe everything including my important data and set it back to how it was - or do I need to take some other course of action? I'm very familiar with using a PC but I know very little about any of the nitty-gritty stuff so I hope this won't get too complicated!

Any help or advice would be very much appreciated :)
With many thanks,
Laura

Glaswegian

Hi and welcome to TSF.

You might find it easier to use DBan which will completely wipe any hard drive.