There was recently a TV programme over here in the UK called 'Real Story' that showed just how easy your personal details can be grabbed hold of once you dispose of a PC. I know most reading this will be aware of the safest thing to do when you no longer want your old PC. But this programme was a very interesting watch.

Heres a link to the BBC Real Story site.You might want to take a look at the links just to the right also,pretty interesting.

BBC - Real Story

i heard the best way to make sure noone gets that info is to just smash the harddrive, becuase you can still retrieve some files even after they are erased from the harddrive with a program, is this true?

I watched the same program graveangel,
Thanks for the link.

I have pasted in a link to a page from the university about different methods of obliterating data from hard-drives. They provide examples of what to do and which method is best in what kind of situation.

Secure Data Removal

Orange Blossom

Yep, thats exactly what i mean Ussr1943. If the PC is for the local garbage site and you are not wanting the hard-drive, i tend to break them up. There are places you can goto that wipe over your hard-drive upto 1000 times in order to erase your info on them, but you may only need to do that if you are selling your PC on. If you no longer need it at all and its not for sale, i'd destroy the hard-drive.

D-Trojanator - No problem friend, seeing as you saw the same programme, im sure you agree it was pretty scary stuff.

Orange Blossom - Thanks for the link, im sure many will find it usefull if selling on there computers

just microwave the hard drive for a few seconds, not smash it, because people can still retrive info from that. or just keep the hard drive. thats what i would do.

the only people I know that can take a smashed Hard drive and get any info from it all have a upper level governmental association (can you say "No Such Agency" ),or possibly a Hdd Manufacturer, as it involves electron micrography (using a electron microscope to "read" data on the disk) very tedious ,time comsuming, and really expensive . the DBaN method is quite sufficient for most. if you've never done it before ,it takes a pretty good bit of time ,depending on the size of the drive, to run a 7 pass wipe (took about 3 hrs to do my 8gig drive) so if you have a "huge" drive it could take a day(s) to finish I would think. the (a) OS will have to be reinstalled afterwards if it is to be reused.
another link to futher expand on Orange Blossom's
"Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory"
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library...papers/gutmann/
I always liked eraser ,used it most of the time instead of sending anything to the trash. a Paranoids best friend