After purchasing a new computer, you may seek to donate your old computer. There are a couple of options to prep your computer for donation.

Format Your Hard Drive

A simple and quick way is to format your hard drive. This is done by using the built-in “format” DOS command. In order to get to a DOS window:

1. Click the Windows Start button

2. Click 'Run'

3. In the box type the following: cmd

4. Click OK.

5. You'll see a window with a black background and white letters. You'll need to know the letter of your drive, but most likely it is 'C'.

6. To format your drive,  type: format c:

7. Hit the Enter key

Once you follow these steps your C drive will be formatted. After a reboot you'll see that you no longer have Windows installed. You can give your computer away at this point – but if you were thinking that you erased all of your information – that's not really the case...

Remove Your Data

If your computer were to fall into the wrong hands, someone could still pull your personal information from off of the hard drive. Formatting does not completely remove data, it only marks the place where your data is as 'writeable' – meaning something else can be written over it. In order to actually remove your data, you need special programs that overwrite the places where your data previously was with garbage data, then delete the garbage data – and this is repeated over and over again.

There are many utilities that will do this and a free option is “Eraser” found here: http://www.heidi.ie/eraser. A non-free utility is called Wipedrive. The directions for both of these differ and are outside the scope of this post, but either of them will enable you to forcefully erase information from your hard drive.

Important: Just remember, before you format or erase, be sure that you've saved any file that you might want to keep to an external drive and transferred it to your new computer. There's no need in causing yourself undue frustration because you didn't take the time to save your files first.

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