Wife'* boss bought himself a new computer and was throwing out the old one. Wife asked if she could have it for a friend that couldn't afford one, so he gave it to her.

I've been messing with it today to clean it up and get it ready for an older woman to use.

Boss man thought he got rid of all his personal stuff.

He forgot to empty the trash bin.

He kept all sorts of notes on his employees along with personal comments.

I really should just format the hard drive, shouldn't I?

check his browsing history

x2

First thing I did.

nothing interesting.

Undelete

Even after formating, you can still bring information back. I never give old computers away. When I use them up they get downgraded to the kids computers. When that'* done I take a hammer to the hard drive.

Yep

I run a military grade hard drive wipe program then use undelete to see what got missed. Never found anything that could be recovered but then I don't keep anything vital unencrypted to begin with so I'm never that worried about it.

There are several free drive wipe programs but KillDisk works great and is FREE!!!
http://www.download.com/Active-Kill-...dlPid=10802776

just keep the HDD... and give away the rest. that way you have another backup

Yeah I'd never give away a computer with a hard drive still in it unless you formatted it and used a program to rewrite random 1 and 0s over the hard drive to help keep data from being recovered. There is some pretty amazing data recovery programs out there that anyone can easily buy (or download).