Best way to completely wipe a laptop?

[NestaVipers]

My old laptop is faulty and as I'm moving house soon I want to get rid of it. Have considered putting it on e-baying but I'm a little jittery at the prospect of personal info lingering on after a system wipe. What's the best way to get rid of all stored data? Even if it just ends up in skip I still want to make sure it's thoroughly cleansed before getting rid. Many thanks.

It depends on how paranoid you really are. Personally I'd just format the disk using the Windows boot CD and I'd be happy enough with that.

I understand that my data could be recovered by someone who really REALLY wanted to but lets be honest, I'm just a lowly IT geek. I don't work for MI5.

But if you do have something very sensitive or just want to be 1000% sure then there are disk wiping tools out there such as this Disk Wiper

The ultimate is to just remove the disk since you say your laptop is faulty then take a hammer to it!

I was going to say I used a baby wipe & the hoover; then I read your OP

Sorry

I would also partition the hard drive - and then repartition it, in addition to reformatting it.

me too KatyMac :o Also, don;t use Milton as, yes it kills all the nasties but it does bleach it a bit

Repartitioning the HD will not achieve anything that reinstalling from the boot cd would not do so don't bother.

Use DBAN as niceguy linked to, it's not so much extra trouble and it will mean that you won't have to worry about whether somebody out there has a copy of your family holiday snaps or worse.

Make sure you have a working reinstall DVD set first though.

I'm sure your right MrA, but I'm paranoid a belt and braces kind of a donki

If the computer is a Mac then it will come with a utility that will do a pretty good job of safely erasing all the data on a computer's hard drive (it repeatedly overwrites every bit of it with blank data). Ask if you need more info...

Thanks for all your replies. I think I'm going to download some software and do it that way if i can the bloody thing to function for long enough to complete the wipe

Also like all the de-crumbing advice Tried the old "baby-wipe-over-the-hoover-nozzle-trick" last time it was suggested on here... disgustingly effective.

Highly recommend DBAN but then if you do eBay it, make sure that your auction states that it comes with no OS installed!