Question: I have a Pentium 2, Windows 95 system and would like to recycle it, but first would like to wipe the hard drive clean. How is this done?
Answer: This is a great question. As it relates to recycling, going “Green” for me is less a matter of doom and gloom than a matter of stewardship. If you save energy, you will save money. Recycling of computer parts was even a matter taken up by the last state legislature, who incidentally decided that all manufacturers of computers sold in or into Texas are now required to provide recycling for their brands sold to consumers and home based businesses. We’ll have a link in the show notes to this information.
The second part of the question has to do with wiping the hard drive. We’ve mentioned before that when you delete files, they don’t really go away. The files on your computer have all kinds of personal information about you. Before disposing of an old hard drive or computer, it’s important to wipe your personal data off the drive to prevent identity theft. One job I did required me to drill holes into the hard drives we replaced to prevent their future use. Of course this is overkill if you’re just selling your old stuff. Several free utility programs exist to either securely delete individual files, or the whole drive. One of these is called SDelete from Sysinternals which is a command-line utility that deletes files according to a military spec. Another program called “Darik’s Boot and Nuke” requires you to make a CD first. When you boot from that CD, it blanks every hard drive in the system it can find. You can find this program on the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. We’ll have links in the show notes on daconsult.com/forums to all these. Just be sure if you’re going to resell your computer or give it away, include all the CDs and whatever other stuff came with the computer.
Cool Site: http://www.surveymonkey.com: Do you ever have a need to do surveys? What about collecting the information from the survey and summarizing it? This may not be the only website that does this, but www.surveymonkey.com offers free accounts that allow you to create surveys, collect and summarize up to 100 responses. The surveys are simple to set up and offer several different types of questions. For soliciting responses, you can either put a link to the survey on your website or in an email, you can upload your email and have them send a survey invitation, or create a popup for your webpage that invites visitors to take your survey. If you need more control over your surveys, more than 10 questions per survey, or more than 100 complete responses to any survey, you’ll have to upgrade your account to a paid account. Prices and features vary, so just check their website for details.
Cool Gadget: “Recycle” USB flash drive – I read about this one on Engadget and since we were just talking about recycling, it earned the spot. It’s called the “Recycle” it’s a USB flash drive, It’s available in capacities from 512MB to 16GB, but its hook is that its enclosure is composed of recycled newspapers. This should make it easy to camouflage, but just be sure not to leave it lying around or the cleaning crew may accidentally throw it away.
It's All “Geek” To Me: Pixel: Your computer screen is made up of a grid of square dots. More dots on the screen make for a finer picture: diagonal lines appear straighter and curved lines look smoother. These dots are called pixels. Pixel is a contraction of the two words Picture Element.
