Are there any components of my PC that might retain personal information after I give the PC away?

Question

Other than the hard drive? Also, should I go with physical destruction of the hard drive? I don't have a disc for windows--it just came with my pc when I bought it from Dell. So I can't use the disc to reinstall or whatever. Please help. I have Windows XP.

Answer 1

Well, I would think that a simple formatting of the drive would suffice.  Unless you're a Russian spy and giving it away to the CIA.

Answer 2

If you are giving a PC away then keep the hard drive (you can always add it to a caddy and use as an external drive) - but never hand over the hard drive as there is always personal info that can be retrieved even after formatting!

If you don't want to keep the drive then destroy it.

Answer 3

no it is just the harddrive that contains personal information.If you want you can download a program called boot and nuke.it erases all the contents of your hard drive so that it is almost impossible to reteive with programs like get data back etc.here is the link to boot and nuke :

http://dban.sourceforge.net/