Sometimes you will end up selling your computer or giving it away instead of just throwing it away. You might still have a useful machine but decided to get an upgrade to something a bit faster. The one huge concern for many when it comes to selling a computer it what happens to the data on the machine. You might have important files or documents that you don't want others to see. Find out what you can do to protect your old data.
You can reformat the drive. This means that you are taking all the files on the machine and deleting them so that the drive goes back to a blank state. The advantage of this is that your data is gone but the disadvantage is that the operating system is also gone.
You can use your Windows disks and load the operating system on it again. What this does if you do a destructive install is removes all the files and puts the machine back to the state that it was in when you purchased it originally. Your data should be gone.
Another option is to just delete the things that you don't want others to find on your drive. In order to keep those technically inclined from finding the deleted data, fill up the drive with media files and delete them over and over. This way it's harder to find the old data if not making it impossible.
You can get a free program called Sdelete that is made for this very purpose. It will delete a file permanently instead of leaving traces of it on the drive. This way you can feel comfortable getting rid of things without messing with the installation of the operating system.
Another option is to just buy the computer a new drive when you are selling it. This is the only way to 100% protect your data since you still have the old drive.
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