best cleaning program for windows xp professional?

Question

i'm planning on selling my computer to my friends friend,but i have a lot of information on my hard drive,like banking information,every time i make a transaction i use the internet,when i make my income tax,not just my information ,also my family's,you might think just keep the hard drive,but i'm gonna buy another one,one that has 150 gigabyte,because i'm not the only one that uses it,anyways i was reading a little on the internet and i found this program called
Active@ Kill Disk - Hard Drive Eraser ,but my question is,is it the best program to wipe out,clean or whatever the word in so nobody can get that information back from your hard drive,because i heard that formating your hard drive does nothing, i do't know where the hard drive is gonna end up in a couple of years, so i really think it would be really useful not just for me,it'd be useful for all the people who want to to this,if there is a free program that can do this ,if not you can suggest me to buy one.

Answer 1

Once you are ready to fry your drive, goto http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ and download their program. One of the utilities will format to DoD standards.

Answer 2

If you have personal information on the hard disk, deleting files or formatting won't do the trick. You need to do what's called a low level format, which completely erases the disk. This is a free program that will low level format your hard drive:

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2006.04.12-HDD-Low-Level-Format-Tool/

Run that on your hard drive and nobody will get your data.

Answer 3

BC wipe
we use it at work. it was the only program that was authorized by our information assurance department at work.