There comes a time in the life of every computer when it's time to be removed from service. Maybe it's because you just scored a hot new system and you're donating Old Reliable to a school or nonprofit, or maybe you're going to sell it on eBay to help pay for that fancy new machine. Either way, you need to get your stuff—programs and more importantly personal data—off the hard drive. A simple delete won't get the job done, so it's time to find a more industrial-strength tool to take care of business.
Darik's Boot And Nuke may be the answer you're looking for. Download this tool and install it on a floppy disk or CD, and you're all set for a high-powered hard disk-wiping machine. This guy takes out programs, data, even partition tables. While the best way to be absolutely sure that your data has been removed is to physically destroy your hard drive, you're going to have a hard time getting much for your system with no disk drive and all those metal shavings in there. Short of that, you can probably sleep pretty well at night after using this guy to clean out your machine.
There's no guarantee that this app will render all of your data unrecoverable forever, but for the price—did we mention it's free?—you probably can't do much better.
Download Darik's Boot And Nuke
