[NBLUG/talk] Best way to dispose of a working computer

Sean seanvanco at gmail.com
Sat Aug 12 08:09:37 PDT 2006


I don't have any contact information, but I am familiar with the usual
donation process.

What usually happens is you donate the computer, and then they give
you a tax-deductable receipt (usually... some are not set up to do
that) of the approximate worth of the computer. Once they erase your
data, they may mail you a receipt for the data destruction.

When it comes to confidential personal data, I find that I cannot
bring myself to trust everyone to handle my data properly, as
eventually I will run into someone who will not. As such, I prefer to
erase my own data before handing it over.

I will leave the exact program to use up to the others in this group,
as I use a Windows based open source (under GNU) program called
eraser. It can take some time to erase the data (hours to days), but
only a professional (usually at great expense) will be able to recover
anything.

Good luck.

Sean



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