Selling My Netbook, Do I Need To Worry About Id Theft Or Any Other Issues?
December 7th, 2009 by admin | Filed under technie stuff.I have placed my netbook on the market and have a buyer. Its new, only 6 months old and for a while I did everything on it. I have deleted all the extra programs I downloaded, cleared the Internet history, including cookies, passwords, etc and have created an entirely new user account and deleted my old one. Do I need to worry about card numbers being stolen, any form of ID theft or any other security issues when I turn it over to the new owner?
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I personally am paranoid about things like this so I would use Darik’s Boot and Nuke. It essentially erases EVERYTHING from your hard drive by writing over it in any amount of random data (1’s and 0’s). I’m no expert in data recovery so I’m just saying this would be a good idea that I would use.
It can be run from a flash drive so no need for the disk.
LINK: http://www.dban.org/
While you can delete all the programs and clear your internet history there are still files left on your computer in various locations that can contain sensitive data. Your best bet is to reinstall your operating system and format your hard drive. I don’t think netbooks come with installation software though so you might have a friend locate the more sensative data and delete it for you.
Unless buyer is an expert in computer information recovery I would say you are safe.
NO DON’T USE THE DBAN! It’ll wipe out your entire hard drive. If you do so, the buyer will ask for further discount because he has to reinstall the operating system and the drivers unless that’s what you really want.
If the buyer is not the curious type (not like me LOL), MAYBE, just maybe, he won’t bother recovering your sensitive data.
Nevertheless, if you are still concerned about your private data even though you are sure you have deleted your documents, cache, history, saved passwords, user account, etc., you can download the free program called Active@KillDisk from:http://www.killdisk.com/
Active@ KillDisk - Hard Drive Eraser is powerful and compact software that allows you to destroy all data on hard and floppy drives completely, excluding any possibility of future recovery of deleted files and folders.
As I have said, I’m not suggesting that you erase your entire hard drive. The program has a New Wipe function that wipes out all unused space on existing drives, not touching existing data. This will make sure that sensitive data even though you have already erased them from your recycle bin cannot be recovered. I use this on my machine. Remember to use the WIPE function and not the KILL.
After you’ve done this, you can uninstall the program or just leave it there.