DRIVE WIPER

[hgw53t]

  Hello- I'm trying to sell my personal laptop computer.  If I get a buyer, I want to be sure all my personal info is completely erased.  Who knows, I may unknowingly sell it to a computer expert that could recover some personal data.  My questions are- does driver wiper work well for this & what option should use- eg. 1 or 3 or 7 or 35- pass wiper?  I have a 120- GB hard drive & it is about 43% used space on it.  Roughly, how long would it take to run the drive wiper?  Does it remove the operating system, which is Windows Vista?  I want the computer to be usable and ready to go when some one buys it.

[Augeas]

One pass is sufficient. Drive Wiper on a system drive will wipe all free space, but will leave the O/S and all applications you have installed intact, complete with your individual settings. Before you run DW you could run some of the more aggressive options of CC, such as Saved Passwords. You could check all the options in the Cleaner section, but at your own risk as I have never done this. You also want to delete your email accounts and anything else that you can think of that is personal to you. Then run DW. I wouldn't run a Registry clean, but others may differ in their opinions.

[hgw53t]

I want to use the option to "wipe entire drive".  My question is exactly what will it wipe out?  I want the computer to work when I sell it.  Does it wipe out the operating system?

 

Thanks for your quick response last reply.

[Nergal]

Wipe entire drive will erase everything including windows itself. For logical reasons (being that one cannot delete files one relies on to run the deleting software) you can not wipe the entire drive which is running windows at the time. However, wiping an entire drive (from inside a different pc) will leave the drive completely blank and would require you to reinstall windows from its CD