Snaps(Elite) posted this on Thursday, 16th April 2020, 20:33
I have a number of laptops lying around the house which for various reasons have been moved on from. I don't even know the reason for some of them as they belonged to my offspring. My better half keeps on at me to get rid of them which from her means chuck them out. I propose to go through them and reformat wherever possible but I'm guessing they will all be at least Windows 7 or earlier.
If anyone has any recommendations for at least the best disc shredder or any other process I may have to go through to make them usable. How if they wont boot do you clear windows off and install Linux is another question that occurs or is it just ditch the HDD.
admars(Elite) posted this on Thursday, 16th April 2020, 21:14
if you can boot them then dban - Darik's boot and nuke https://dban.org/
is best way to wipe a hard drive, but to be honest a regular format would be sufficient for most people, i.e. format fresh install of windows/linux.
if you're that paranoid and don't have access to a gauss gun, then drill through the drive is best :)
sometimes you see PCs and laptop on freecycle minus the hard drives
I don't think freecycle is running at the moment though, at least my local one isn't.
If they work, then you may find a few ppl will happily take them off your hands, especially if they have kids. I'm lucky, I've got a couple of old ones lying round the house taking up space/in the way, however with lockdown, both kids being at home and being given access to websites to do school work, it's been handy having a couple of extra machines about :) the school site they uses does everything web based, so no software had to be installed.
Failing that, there's a chairty near me, so you may have one near you take old PCs/laptops and if they can be made to work they send them to 3rd world countries for use in schools, or if they can't be used, they reuse/recycle the parts.
Snaps(Elite) posted this on Thursday, 16th April 2020, 22:52
Quote: admars says... "if you're that paranoid and don't have access to a gauss gun, then drill through the drive is best :)" Just watched an episode of Jack Ryan last night with a passing shot of someone doing that very thing. So still current practice then. Thanks for all the info. I'm a total squirrel and hate throwing anything away which comes particularly hard in todays disposable world.
RJS(undefined) posted this on Friday, 17th April 2020, 08:19
Quote: Snaps says... "So still current practice then" It's still the best way to permanently kill a mechanical HDD platter of readable data. But just to warn you, this will kill many drill bits!
