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Afraid of identity theft?

One way criminals can learn all about you is by mining personal data off your old computer's hard drive.

Remember: Just because you delete something doesn't mean it's no longer there.

A few years ago, a pair of M.I.T. graduate students bought 158 used hard drives off of the Internet just to see how many had not been properly erased.

It turned out most of them still held compromising information, including active credit card numbers, pharmaceutical records and more.

One disk actually contained evidence the previous owner was having an affair.

So how do you thoroughly wipe everything off your hard drive?

REALITY CHECK

First thing's first. Don't get carried away. It's one thing to be worried about data being stolen, it's quite another to be paranoid.

Most people are good at heart, and experts generally agree that if you give your old PC - with files deleted - to someone you know (or a needy cause, which I recommend you do), chances are slim the new owner will be doing anything malicious with it.

That said, it's a fact that bad guys are out there and there's always an outside chance that your hard drive could fall into the wrong hands.

With that in mind, I will list the various ways to clean your hard disk, or "wipe" it, starting from the most basic to the deepest, most thorough, methods of erasure.

You can choose the method that suits your needs (or level of paranoia) best.

BASIC

Windows XP offers a utility to do this. It's a multi-step procedure (too many to list here), but is fairly simple and straightforward. You will find the information here:

http://support.microsoft. com/kb/310312

The above procedure is a simple cleanup of the disk. The next level is to reformat your drive, which will do a better job of permanently getting rid of all files and information. Details on how to do that are here:

http://support.microsoft. com/kb/313348

Now, unless a user has special data-retrieval software, reformatting your drive should do the trick.

If you're still not satisfied, however, there are programs you can download that will do a more thorough "wipe."

FREEWARE

There are many free products out there, but the one that seems to garner the most respect among techies is Darik's Boot and Nuke:

http://dban.sourceforge.n et/

You download this product to your computer, then save it to a floppy or CD, depending on which one your computer accesses when it boots up.

The next time you boot your machine, it will automatically delete the contents of any hard drive it can detect.

The

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