How to prepare your computer for Recycling or Disposal

Disclaimer: Customers are responsible for the removal of sensitive data from their hard drives and other storage media before collection.

When readying a computer for recycling or disposal, you should clean your computers hard drive. Back up al your important information first. You don't want to loose thouse valuable family photos.

First, be sure to clean off the hard drive by completely wiping all old data. Acronis Privacy Expert Suite includes a tool called Acronis Drive Cleanser, but there are others as well. If you are up for the chalange to wipe your own hard drive before donating it, you can use one of these free software to do so Wipe is a good one, Eraser is also easy to use and Boot and Nuke (a.k.a. DBAN) is also very popular

Many people don't even bother to delete their files. Just simply formating or deleting doesn't prevent any body with a litle knowledge and free downlaodable disk recovery utility software from the internet to read what was on the disk.

The Hard drive cleaning software program overwrites the entire disk with a bit pattern or patterns and does it repeatedly. Depending on how many times you overwrite your data, you can make it virtually impossible for anyone, to find out what was on the disk. Here is a tip, before your run your favorite hard drive cleaning software do a quick format first, this will save you at least a hour in time. The hard drive uitility software will clean a hardrive in one to four hours depending on the size of the hard drive

Never through your old hard drive in the trash as it contain hazardous materials. A computer that is obsolete to you can be very useful to someone else. Even if the system is broken, it probably contains many parts that can be salvaged and re-used, such as gold! In addition, computers are prolific sources of hazardous substances. It is ecologically better to keep them out of landfills for as long as possible.

Government agencies and financial institutions, such as banks or lending companies, are required to remove information according to the standards set by the Department of Defense.