Technological conquests and a data security question

[strange_complex]

I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself on the technology front today. I have:

• Finally got my DVD-video and Sky-box to talk to one another. It turned out that I'd got it all set up right in the first place, but just needed to choose the A1 channel on the DVD-video machine instead of letting it sit on channel 1.
• Convinced my BT Home Hub to supply full wireless coverage to my entire house, rather than just a 2m pool immediately around it. Those people who said that the key to doing this was changing the channel it was broadcasting on (dakegra first, I think, confirmed by kernowgirl's husband) were really right. Setting it to channel 6 completely transformed it from basically not really working at all to working absolutely perfectly everywhere I could want it to. Amazing.

However, I still have a technological question:

Having recently bought my laptop from Dell, I want to take advantage of their partnership with ReCOM to recycle my old desktop PC to charity. I've checked that it meets their requirements, and established what I need to do to get it collected, but obviously it's crucial to ensure that it is data-safe before it goes out of my house. So far I have:

• Uninstalled pretty much every piece of software I ever installed on it, with the exception of harmless ones like Adobe Acrobat
• Told both IE and Firefox to clear all my personal data (passwords, browser history, favourites etc.)
• Manually deleted all internet cache files, cookies etc. just to be sure
• Wiped all my old documents, pictures and music (after copying them to my new machine, natch) and all temp files
• Emptied the Recycle bin
• Defragmented the hard drive

For the record, I never used anything other than web-based email accounts from it, so there shouldn't be old emails stored anywhere on it.

Is there anything else I should be doing before I let someone else have it? Or is rendering what was my primary personal and work computer for a total of six years truly data-safe so difficult to do properly that I'd be better off smashing the hard-drive with a hammer and taking it to the tip?

Comments

[diffrentcolours]

overwrite every byte on the hard disk several times with random junk - then reinstall Windows on it.

Isn't that tautology?

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

*chuckle*

I'm beginning to feel rather less charitable, though, having read the comments here. Maybe a hammer and the tip is the best route after all...

[diffrentcolours]

The DBAN utility I recommended is simple to use, and good enough that the cost to recover any information from the disk is (a) far more (in terms of resources such as clean rooms and magnetoscopes) than your common or garden thief would use, and (b) far more (in terms of cash) than they could reasonably hope to gain from the information on the disk.

Sure, if you had secrets on there you wanted to keep from MI6 (and a really determined MI6 at that), I'd recommend physical destruction of drive platters, but for pretty much everything else, DBAN suffices.

[rich-r.livejournal.com]

Something along those lines would do it nicely. The important thing is that you need to install a fresh copy of the operating system to be certain that there's nothing of yours easily accessible. Not a big job - or just leave it with a blank hard drive, and the next person can put whatever operating system they want on it.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I've never reinstalled an operating system before, though! It sounds scary...