November 28, 2006
Wipe your hard drive
Identity theft is a real danger, but it can apparently get much worse than that. Stories like this one are almost always apocryphal, but you never can tell . . .
Posted by Nicholas at November 28, 2006 12:10 PM
Not that I would have exactly the same sort of information to keep private but I have always considered a hammer and a flaming BBQ in the backyard to be the best way to deal with an old hard drive.
Like Alan I never keep anything that entertaining on my local drives, but when decommissioning a home box I typically wipe the drive, and then physically destroy it by opening up the HD casing and breaking the itty bitty shiny platter(s) into much smaller bits.
In the odd case where this stuff gets passed on to a family member or friend (where the HD must survive) then a couple of wipes will do it. I don't have the patience to go through the three-times-seven-pass routine to make it completely unrecoverable.
[. . .] a hammer and a flaming BBQ in the backyard to be the best way to deal with an old hard drive
Not to mention being
fun in their own right. ;-)
where this stuff gets passed on to a family member or friend
Once upon a time, I was far enough in advance of the bulk of the market that
every machine I passed on wasn't too far behind the leading edge. Sometime in the last five years, I dropped far enough behind the leading edge that almost nothing from our last batch of "old" computers was worth hanging on to or passing along. I feel . . . antiquated.
I used to be in the same boat. Always had bleeding edge stuff until I started having real bills to pay. The upside (and it is an upside) is that I am now completely ignorant of the latest trends as breathlessly reported in PC Magazine, and my gamebuying expenditures are at an all-time historic low.
The stuff I passed on recently was 1999-vintage boxes, having upgraded to slightly less old 2003-vintage boxes. The receiver of the 20th century antiques recently fried both monitor and tower, so in that light even the lamest functional computer looks better than a busted one.
