donating a PC to charity, how I can wipe everything except windows (w/o re-installing windows)
…short answer, you can’t
You can delete as much as you can, but theres still a lot of traces left. So the real question is how clean do you want it. You can get yourself a copy of Norton’s drive utilities, one of the utilities can perform a DOD approved wipe of empty space. Its like a 10 step process that deletes, writes. deletes, writes… and so on, to ensure that nothing can be gleamed from the drive.
Unfortunately, there really isn’t a way to do it the closest you can get is.
-Remove all programs from the add/remove programs list
-Remove anything you manually installed/downloaded
-Create a new user profile and delete the old one. (To remove any temp files, saved settings and such)
If for some reason some one really wanted to though it wouldn’t be hard to recover most of it. If it’s a non issue and it needs to look “fresh” then the above will do it.
Reinstalling windows would take less time than that. Do you not have a CD/CD-key?
jesus.
a “dod wipe” is 3 times
and i would just wipe the entire drive and reinstall if you want to be 100% sure.
if not. just uninstall all programs. delete of your files. the download a program called “secure clean” and run that with all the settings selected.
now, joe, im not going to get into specifics cus im on vacation and i dont want my brain to start hurting, but just wipe the entire drive and reinstall the OS. so many possibilities of identity theft even if you run these third party programs that “wipe your computer”
Run a disk wipe on it…
remove hard drive…
beat with hammer
burn HD
throw remains into lake
dod req’d us to do 5 wipe
hmm i only wipe once… i guess it never really is clean…
i had to… sry…
Recover from lake, donate to charity.
Dont want the poor kids finding all the gay pronz?
He wants to challenge them to find it. Poor kids need work ethic more than anything!
:lol: :tup: