Wipe Your Hard Drive Clean

Do you ever have a need to delete all the information on your Windows computer's hard drive? For instance, if you are about to sell or give your old computer to someone else, you might first want to remove all your personal information.

If you search on Google, you can find a number of stories about private data being retrieved from computers purchased on eBay and elsewhere.

Don't let that happen to you!

Many people are surprised to hear that Microsoft Windows doesn't delete very much when told to delete files. Windows simply marks the space as "available for reuse." In other words, when you tell Windows to delete a file, your old information remains on the hard drive for an indefinite amount of time. It remains available until the operating system eventually writes new information in its place. In fact, even reformatting a disk with Microsoft's format command will leave much information behind. This is true of hard drives, floppy disks, flash drives, ZIP disks, and other storage devices.