Donating A Computer

[dekestone]

I've got an ancient Dell notebook that I'd like to give away to a worthy group. Any suggestions? (The keyboard is useless but otherwise it works OK.)

And what would I have to do to ensure that all my data files are completely deleted and unretrievable?

[dave_boo]

Get a Linux liveCD. Open up a terminal and run "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda". You can repeat that step as many times as you'd like, but a single pass will prevent even the most dedicated data retrival expert from finding much of anything usefull on it. If you have grandma's secret recipes, and don't want 'Big Brother' finding out, you'd do the USA's government recommendation of (I think) 7 different wipes.....but that's quite excessive.