Remove Software and File?

[treeman]

i hope someone can help me as i a m about to sell a pc i have with the os and hard drive it has at the moment.

i have vsta basic so if i was to use the uninstall option to remove any files and other programmes i wish to remove from the hard drive for security reasons will the vista uninstall option be safe enough with no chance of if being brought back later??

also can someone maybe recommend a good free remover i can use in place of this on my vista basic system??

cheers for any help adn advice anyone can give me!

[Graham M]

Do you not have a System Restore CD/DVD that came with the PC?

[MovedGoalPosts]

It's the data files you want to be more concerned about than the software.

I would suggest installing a program such as "eraser"

Then you delete all your data files and eraser will overwrite that hard disk space with jumbled data whcih makes any recovery very difficult.

Deletion of files, or even a simple reformat will not necessarily prevent recovery of data until the data has been overwritten by other stuff. That is why eraser type programs can work. They take their time though.

Now you can use the windows remove software functions. Or better still, reformat the PC and just re-install Vista, nothing else.

Of course to be really safe, install a different hard disk.

[Raistlin]

Ok.

If you sell that PC with the drive in it then you have to assume that anything on the drive could be recovered.

You can get a good level of assurance that the contents of the drive have been deleted by using Secure Erase (you need follow the instructions on the site to create a bootable floppy or a bootable CD with it on), but in theory even that isn't perfect.

BTW, Secure Erase is used by certain VERY well known LARGE organisations, to scrub some VERY sensitive data!

[treeman]

thanks alot for all your help and advice which i very much appreciate!

[Halcyon]

To really erase everything you need to run the eraser program about 20 to 30 times by which time the heads will have been working non stop and the drive will probably be on it's way out.

[Raistlin]

Originally Posted by Halcyon

To really erase everything you need to run the eraser program about 20 to 30 times by which time the heads will have been working non stop and the drive will probably be on it's way out.

That certainly used to be the case with old drives, due to the way that the tracks were spaced.

These days, with more modern drives, a single overpass will usually provide sufficient assurance against everything except a microscopic recovery. 4-5 overwrites (with the right product) is more than enough to almost completely defeat the majority of recovery techniques[1].





[1]Let's just say that you'd need LOTS of money, time, and resources, to recover anything at all - even then you probably wouldn't get any data that was of any use to you.