It is time to get rid of my old computer adn upgrade to a new one. Whether I will sell or donate it, I want to make sure I've removed any financial information that's left on it from my online banking and shopping. I think all deleted data remains on my computer's hard drive! How can I protect myself and even others?|||none of your financial information should be stored in your computer at all. It should only be stored on the sites themselves. But if you are really worried about that, you should just destroy your hard drive. I know you might want someone to get use out of a perfectly good computer, but you can never be sure.|||You should completely reboot your hard drive.|||format the drive and reinstall the OE programs.|||Put a nail through the harddrive.|||You can restore your computer if you have your restore CD's. This will take your computer to the time you bought it.|||The only way to be real sure is to put a hammer to the hard drive. That is the 99.99% proof way.
You can delete or re-format the drive but the data can still be on the disk but the area where the data is can still be there but earmarked as free space to be over written. If someone who had the know how really wanted to get data out they could. But there are programs there can can do better than a standard format.
Hard drives are cheap anyway.
To the comment below:
Though online banking details are stored at the server there is still financial data that can be stored on computers. Many people use programs such as Microsoft Money which store details.
Also ID theft is big business and many people have personal information on their hard drives.
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