How to wipe a computer (or two) clean before disposing?

Big-assed electromagnet pulsing.

or a nuke...

Seriously, here's the procedure:

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofthetrade/tp/erase-hard-drive.htm

I did it 1 time on a mac. It was years ago and from what I remember I did a rewrite with zeroes. It seemed to take hours. Now I would just take a hammer and destroy the system.

I like those bleach wipes in the little plastic container.

very handy and sanitary...

That was funny!!!

It certainly was.

Reminds me of the guy who told me I should get my car washed and waxed...and then junk it.

UPDATE.
Okay, I tried to use DBAN (stands for Derick's Boot and Nuke).
Right.
What Derick, or however it's spelled, fails to tell you is HOW to use DBAN.
That's right.
No instructions, just download it, get it onto a disc and then..
...bupkus..
..no body knows the trouble I seen.....
Kind of like giving a can of coffee to a six year old and expecting that they KNOW about BIOS set-ups and such, or, in the case of the six year old, that they know how to operate a Mr. Coffee.

So.
I used my military training or the 'attitude' they warned me about using at the home, I can't remember which .....

I took the two beasts apart.
One hard drive came out slicker than deer guts on a doorknob.
I dumped it into a bucket of salt water.
(The corrosive effect of the salt is supposed to, after a week or so, etch the hard drive beyond recovery.)

The other hard drive would not come out.
I removed every frigging screw (TORX Hah! I have Torx drivers) but I could not get it to budge.
So I got out my trusty drill, three of those goldie kind of drill bits and PUNCHED a bunch of holes in that puppy.

There were chips all over the place.

Thanks for all of the suggestions and ,,,,,,other helpful hints.


Joe(Who wants a used monitor?)Nation

Reformat your hard drive and reinstall Windows several times. Doing it several times will bleach the drive clean.

Another way is to use a program like Privacy Guardian by PC Tools Software. It has a Bleaching feature that rewrites over empty parts of the hard drive, browser caches, historys, and password sections if chosen.

If you rewrite over a given part of the hard drive 3 or more times, any data that has been overwritten will be pretty much impossible to recover. I believe 3 times is the policy standard used by the Dept of Defense when cleaning their computers for disposal.

If you had a microwave oven, I bet nuking a hard drive for 5 minutes or so would make it unsearchable.

And at the same time render the microwave a boat anchor- arcing and sparking.