OT-Giving old laptop away

Broke friend's 80yo mom. Wants to read email and browse internet.

Have an old Dell Inspiron 3800 Pentium 3 600mHz with 256mb ram, and 40GB
hard drive to donate.

Other than a complete format to wipe it clean, and start with Dell XP cd
(not even SP1 on it) install, can someone recommend a program to assure
I've cleaned my private data out?

I'll use add/remove for programs, but an a little concerned I may miss
something, and when she passes away, throws it out, etc. someone a bit
more savvy could find something I missed.

Thanks
--

"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are
evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
Albert Einstein

On 6/24/2010 9:37 AM, pheasant16 wrote:
Broke friend's 80yo mom. Wants to read email and browse internet.

Have an old Dell Inspiron 3800 Pentium 3 600mHz with 256mb ram, and 40GB
hard drive to donate.

Other than a complete format to wipe it clean, and start with Dell XP cd
(not even SP1 on it) install, can someone recommend a program to assure
I've cleaned my private data out?

I'll use add/remove for programs, but an a little concerned I may miss
something, and when she passes away, throws it out, etc. someone a bit
more savvy could find something I missed.

A full format (not a quick one) would probably be plenty, but if you
want something more aggressive you can use Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN).

http://www.dban.org/

"pheasant16" wrote in message
...
Broke friend's 80yo mom. Wants to read email and browse internet.

Have an old Dell Inspiron 3800 Pentium 3 600mHz with 256mb ram, and 40GB
hard drive to donate.

Other than a complete format to wipe it clean, and start with Dell XP cd
(not even SP1 on it) install, can someone recommend a program to assure
I've cleaned my private data out?

I'll use add/remove for programs, but an a little concerned I may miss
something, and when she passes away, throws it out, etc. someone a bit
more savvy could find something I missed.

Thanks
--

"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are
evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
Albert Einstein

A full format will not wipe the disk. It will only remove
all directory references. All data will remain on the disk
intact, and could easily be recovered. The best solution
is to go to the drive manufacturer's website, and download
their disk wipe utility.

On 6/24/2010 9:38 AM, Grinder wrote:
On 6/24/2010 9:37 AM, pheasant16 wrote:
Broke friend's 80yo mom. Wants to read email and browse internet.

Have an old Dell Inspiron 3800 Pentium 3 600mHz with 256mb ram, and 40GB
hard drive to donate.

Other than a complete format to wipe it clean, and start with Dell XP cd
(not even SP1 on it) install, can someone recommend a program to assure
I've cleaned my private data out?

I'll use add/remove for programs, but an a little concerned I may miss
something, and when she passes away, throws it out, etc. someone a bit
more savvy could find something I missed.

A full format (not a quick one) would probably be plenty, but if you
want something more aggressive you can use Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN).

http://www.dban.org/

+1 for DBAN. It's one of the few programs I know of to really scrub a
drive. Takes a bit of time, iirc, but it works.

On Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:02:03 -0400, "Ian D"
wrote:

[snip]

A full format will not wipe the disk. It will only remove
all directory references.

Format used to write zeros (or something) to every sector.

All data will remain on the disk
intact, and could easily be recovered. The best solution
is to go to the drive manufacturer's website, and download
their disk wipe utility.


--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us

"God; (he's) my favorite fictional character." Homer Simpson

On Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:37:05 -0500, pheasant16
wrote:

Broke friend's 80yo mom.

They'll be no end to the phone calls... Don't do it!

A_C

Agent_C wrote:
pheasant16

Broke friend's 80yo mom.

They'll be no end to the phone calls... Don't do it!

I agree that there should be some kind of plan about what is going to
happen about the support, which I think should be coming from the friend
above, not the friendly source of the hardware.

That means that the friend needs to be able to support whatever kind of
OS and software is on the machine.

That isn't going to work out very well with the default XP with no SP,
nor would it be a happy situation with some insecure browser/OS
combination like IE6.

Depending on what the friend is familiar with or could be made to be
familiar with, maybe the OS should be a linux distro. If that idea is
out of the question, then I think that the XP OS should be brought up to
SP3 and the browser condition should be a secure one, however that might
best be achieved considering the support friend's skills and preferences.

If the idea is that you the OP are supposed to be the support person, I
would think that isn't exactly fair of your friend to expect that.


--
Mike Easter