APEX DS

Have you ever been to the basement of your office building and seen hundreds of obsolete or broken computers sitting in the hallway? What do you do with those CRT monitors you have at home after you replace them with flat screens? What do you do with all of that e-waste? Previously, many people would just toss the computer or monitor in the trash. Thankfully, recycling computers is now easy even for the home user.

Technology is causing computers to become obsolete at a very quick pace. Prices have decreased as well, allowing users to replace the old technology with the latest and greatest available. With the stockpile of old computers growing, why is it vital that we recycle? As computers decompose, dangerous chemicals find their way to the water supply and into the air.

Computers contain many valuable elements that can be used after reclamation. These include lead, gold, and copper. For example, a 15-inch monitor can contain over five pounds of lead that can be reused to construct new system.

You can download disk wiping products for free from the internet. There are many similar products, but the most respectable ones are Darik’s Boot and Nuke. First, download the software to your computer and save it in the drive your computer accesses when it boots up. The software then will automatically erase all the contents of all the drives detected the next when your computer boots up. Make sure that you have read the instruction carefully and back up all data you need when you use it in your computer.

The last desperate thing to do in making your data irretrievable is by destroying it. When you are in hurry and have no time to use any software to clean up your drives but you still don’t want anyone to be able to look into your data, then you can just simply destroy your hard drive into pieces. Wear goggles and gloves, grab a big hammer and smash the hammer with maximum power to your hard drive. You can also drill your hard drive if you have the tool. Just make sure that you have done maximum damage to your hard drive. In theory, experts can still retrieve your data, but it will take large amount of money and extremely sophisticated software and hardware.

One of the ways how people steal your your identity is by looking into your old computer’s hard drive. You may think that you already erased all your data when you sold or donated your computer to someone else or dumped it in the dump yard, but you actually didn’t. Just because you have erased your data, it doesn’t mean that it is no longer there. Most people do not know how to wipe off their data thoroughly from their hard drive. Two MIT graduate students bought 158 hard drives several years ago to purposely see how many people had erased their data properly. They found proofs of someone’s affair in one of the hard drives.

You may feel paranoid right now after reading the story above, yet you don’t need to. Experts say that there are still many good people out there who won’t use your erased data for illegal purposes when they buy your used hard drive. However, your hard drive may fall into the wrong hands. Therefore, here are some methods you can use to wipe data thoroughly from your hard drive.