Donating your computer to a worthy cause

Diy-Computer-Repair can help!

Things you should do before you give that computer away!

Point # 2: Do not assume that when you donate your old computer that the receiving charity will not look at the data on the computer and use it, remember when you buy software you get one license to install and use that software on one computer! Unless you are a Corporation and are buy bulk license. DO NOT leave any data on the computer!

Point # 3: You can donate your old computer to a charitable organization, you may be able to take a tax deduction for its present value (not what you paid for it new). You should ask your tax advisor for advice on the amount of deduction to take, but be sure to request a receipt from the organization to have as proof of the donation.

Ok, now we got that outa the way so let's git down ta buzness.

You will want to insure you use a reputable drive wiping program that will erase the hard drive to a point that it would cost more than the data is worth to recover it. Any program that has the US Department of Defense 5220.22 M
compliant rating will do this.

You can get trial software to do your wiping, one I am going to review is called  Active@ KillDisk, This is a program that will wipe your hard drive from DOS or from Windows. I would suggest you do it from DOS with the external power adapter plugged in for a laptop because it will take some time. Like the defragmenter it depends on how big the drive is and how many iterations you select for the wipe.

How it works:

The wipe program has to have exclusive control of the drive, thus it is better to do this from the DOS, not Windows Operating System. The program will write a series of 1's and 0's in what is called a 5220.22 M pattern, some programs will use a random pattern for each iteration. I won't go into details on how it is done but it will take some time to complete each pass you set the program to run.

The reason for wiping your hard drive is to remove all traces of your data and activities. Once the wipe is complete even the experts will have a hard time recovering any data from the drive.

Program tested:

Active@ KillDisk download page.

There are two different modes of running this program, both from DOS. One is from a floppy disk, the other is from a CD. You can download a zip file that you open and put the program on a pre configured boot floppy, or you can use their program that will create the boot floppy with the program on it. Or if you have cd burning software you can burn the bootable CD. If you are undecided you can download their free suite of programs that contains all three methods.

The free version only does one pass of all zeros, to get a more comprehensive wipe you will have to purchase the program.

To wipe a 12 gig hard drive in a Pentium III laptop it took approximately 45 minutes for one pass. So if you had a 40 GB hard drive and made one pass you are looking at a little over two hours. If you purchase the program and ran it for three passes it would be six hours to complete.

There are a lot of other programs out on the web that will do the same thing but I could not find any others that had a trial period or were free.

As always how much is your data, ID, and family security worth?

I will not advise on where to donate your computer. I am how ever a retired military and would like to see laptops donated to our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen over seas in harms way. The full story is here about donating old laptops: donate-a-laptop

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