How to safely dispose of PC

[trulyscrumptious43]

Our PC (tower thing) is rubbish and needs taking down the tip. Is there a way that I can make sure our info on there is not accessed? (Passwords, emails etc).
Bearing in mind that the main problem seems to be the screen displays the bottom half at the top and the top half at the bottom - a bit like the old vertical hold problem, for those who remember old tellies!

Take the hard disk out and smash it with a hammer, really smash it. It's the best way of making sure no data can ever be retrieved.

IS the problem the screen or the PC unit. Does the screen work when connected to a different computer.

There are various ways you can make it that your data will not be read. You could take a hammer to the hard disk or use a programme like paragon disk wiper

Since you do not dispose of PCs on a regular basis I imagine the free trial version would meet your needs.

Or alternatively install linux on your old machine and reformat any windows partitiions.

It's not the screen, we use it to watch tv on my laptop and it's fine.

Hahaha to install linux on old machine - if I knew how to do that I wouldn't be thinking about throwing it away...sorry am total ignoranumus. Installing AVG is about as far as it gets with maintenance for me.

How do I get the hard disc out - ie what am I looking for?

Open up the tower, probably at one side. The hard drive will look like a large cigarette packet. It should have a wide ribbon cable and a small power cable plugged into it. When you get the disk out, if you turn it over you'll see a circuit board on the bottom (most likely). If you can, either punch a screw driver through it, or snap it off and in half. That's the controller card for the disk.

You need a screw driver to take the box apart. A hard disk looks like this

It is a primative and very effective way of making your computer hard disk unusable.

You might like to try gparted live CD

You need to download the iso image. An iso image is a file that CD burning software uses to store an image of a CD. Using CD/DVD writer software eg. Nero or Roxio to burn the image to a disk. Once you have created the disk put it in the CD drive and restart your computer. Your computer should allow you to boot up from the CD rather than the hard disk. You may need to alter the settings in the bios to allow this. You can then delete the partitions with Windows on (and ofcouse your data)

Installing linux is really easy. This page gives you instructions
www.ubuntu.com/download

If you are going to be downloading ISO images and burning your own CD then I would download ultimatebootcd and wipe the disk with DBAN, which is one of the tools on UBCD.

As reallytired says it's not difficult to install Linux, however, if it's a hardware problem, then installing Linux won't help.