How do you erase the memory?

Question

How do you erase the memory from computer if I want to throw it out or give it away? I want to make sure everything, all my personal information and all deleted documents are really erased before I get rid of it.

Answer 1

I remember reading an article once that said you would have to re-format your hard drive almost a dozen times to make the data unrecoverable. do as the last poster said and pick up software to help, or simply physically destroy the drive.

Answer 2

You only need to switch off the computer to erase the memory as the data contained therein is volatile and needs the computer to be switched on. What I think you mean is that you want to erase the contents of the hard drive. You've got a couple of options here. Either use something like Eraser, Darik's Boot and Nuke, or KillDisk, which will write over your hard drive a number of times with different number, hence making the data unrecoverable, or you could take a hammer to the hard drive.

Sadly, just deleting the data, or even formatting the hard drive is not a foolproof method of dealing with this. There are many data recovery programs that are able to recover data that has been deleted in this manner.

Take a look at the following sites. They should help you get rid of all the valuable data that you don't want prying eyes looking at.

Answer 3

U can either go to the hard drive n manually delete all the folders on each drive but even doing tat is not 100 % foolproff as there are programs tat can recover deleted stuff. To really get rid of yr stuff u can just take out the drive from its slot n destroy it which will make yr stuff forever inaccesible. There are programs on sale tat can do the job too, but why pay when u r going to get rid of yr PC.