What programs do you use to clean your hard drive?

Question

I plan on selling my computer and I don't want the people to see my deleted files. I want to erase files I've deleted out of the recycle bin and not the ones I use.

Answer 1

format the hard disk and reinstall windows
http://yanswers.blogspot.com/2006/10/windows-reinstallation.html

Answer 2

the absolute most secure way is to not sell the drive with the computer. buy a new blank drive for the box and stick it in. however, if you don't want to do that, what I might suggest is pseudo low-level format.

i call it pseudo because a real low-level format of a drive it's possible. it would overwrite the drives basic information it needs to function, but most manufacturers call it low-level formatting because it writes data to every sector of the drive. What you'll need to do is find out who makes your hard drive, then visit their website and look for low-level format utilities. Doing this will completely overwrite the data on the drive and not just mark it usable by the FAT (which is what formatting does most of the time). It doesn't take too long and is also good for tuning a drive up as any sectors that are corrupted get marked during this process.

I've done this on drives and I will tell you, short of forensics tools, you can't extract the data back from the drive.

http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/low-level-format.html has a list of common manufacturers and links to their formatting tools.

Answer 3

Use Norton Utilities... Norton has a utilities that can erase your temporary internet explorer files, unused swap files, recent document histories, cleaning of unused registry entry.. and best of all makes your deleted files UNRECOVERABLE!..
No need to reformat!
hope this one helps :)

Answer 4

it is best to reformat the hard drive and start from scratch