Countdown to the Meltdown

:-/

Do we have any say in this?

*kapusta*

Wait till I hit the first really frustrating bump in my current project, and bring it over. 🙂

eclipse you dont have to melt it. you can get all your personal stuff removed from your hard drive and save it to another computer etc. theres a place in BP that can do it. its located on 18th and 60th i think. there’s a guy dovid there that can help. otherwise my husband does these things…

eclipse, what’s your plan to take the place of the CR? I noticed that of the last 50 posts, 9 are yours. You’ve been pretty active and faithful here. Is it doable? Please only answer whatever you feel comfortable answering, but what will you do to satisfy your CR cravings? What could possibly be as juicy? What will you do to prevent CR withdrawal symptoms? What will you do when serious temptations arise? (Im asking because I think Id like to wean myself a bit).

Eclipse try downloading a free program called C-Clean which will competely sanitize your hard drive. Use the option to clean white space. That should be as effective as melting it without destroying it. Make sure you set the option before you start.

In general when one deletes data, it leaves it there, and just puts a question mark into the first letter of the file. It looks deleted, but the info is still there. Undelete programs can recover. However, if you use a program to clean white space, it will actually erase and overwrite the data. Various standards call for repeating this 3 or even 7 times to make sure it is competely gone. You can set the choice of standard in there as well.

The old Norton Desktop also did similar things, I think.

If C-clean is not what you want, there may be other better programs out there, as well.

eclipse~ thanks for the heads up: nay, on the mini. I had gotten my daughter a 10″ mini & it turned out I was penny-wise (not so much!) & pound foolish!! :/

eclipse-

Physically destroying your computer or its hard disk is an extreme and most likely unnecessary step.

D-ban is probably more than adequate for your security needs.

I’d recommend either using D-ban and then giving it away, or just putting it in a closet for future use – if you ever travel it’s great for getting directions, hours places are open, weather, etc.

eclipse- does this mean you’re leaving us?

eclipse–

You’re welcome -it’s my pleasure.

I try to strike a balance when giving cautionary info to people who may not be computer savvy, so that they are made aware of potential dangers without turning them paranoid.

No sure I always succeed ?

Pashuteh Yid–

I used Norton’s “Wipefile” and “Wipedisk” utilities many years ago.

Sorry, I hit send button before I was finished. If you go into Command program (old DOS interface which you access via Start Menu/Command and then at the prompt type Format C: /P:7 /X, it should wipe out your whole disk and remove any traces of what was on there. (I don’t know if you even need the /X).

You will then have to reinstall your operating system and all programs. If you have the original windows CD, you would insert into the CD drive and then follow the instructions to reinstall everything. This can take about 2 hours sometimes. You must have all the original disks, though, as sometimes there is a second Drivers and Utilities disk.

But to physically destroy the machine seems like a waste.