Regardless of how you dispose of an old computer, whether you give it to a friend, or take it to a local drop-off center, you need to make sure that the information on your hard drive isn't used for nefarious purposes, such as identity theft. The last time I got rid of a computer, I removed the hard drive, and still have the silly thing in my closet. Luckily, it doesn't take up much space
There are better ways. According to PC Magazine (Pipeline, Dec. 28, 2004), EraseYourHardDrive uses "the same technology employed by the Department of Defense to remove all data from a hard drive."
Autoclave: Free HD erasing program you can put on a floppy. http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/ The only downside to any of these erasing programs is that it takes time to do all this over-writing, but it works. Fdisking or re-formatting a drive is NOT effective at all.
Very nice article. You can erase your data permanently with the use of drive wipe software which overwrite the data and data becomes unaccessible beyond recovery.
Thanks