Laptops are used to accomplish daily work by saving huge amount of personal and official data. Laptops has many advantages over desktop like portability, reliability and built in mouse, keyboard, and speaker. However there are some users who want to dispose old laptop which is not an easy job. Such users should follow some reliable way to properly dispose old laptops.
Don’t throw away laptops because like any other electronic gadgets, laptops too have some hazardous substances which are very harmful to the environment. Instead user can opt for, re-selling, donating or recycling laptops.
- Re-Selling: Some people and organization buy used laptops so it is better to resell old laptops instead of throwing them.
- Donate: There are many organizations that collect old laptops and computers and give them to charities.
- Recycle: User can give their old laptops to the manufacturer who has some programs to recycles laptop and its components.
Above are some ways which you can opt, but before opting you have to take some precautions, because these ways have some limitations with respect to data security. Disposing old laptops or other data storage devices with data in it may invite many threats to the user, so proper method must be carried out to erase data from it. Laptop may contain many important details like bank account number, photos, contact numbers, videos, confidential office files, private files, tax details and lot more. If such laptops are improperly disposed then there are chances that it might fall in wrong hands and data stored in it might be misused. Luckily, there are several easy methods which user can follow to safely dispose old laptops.
How to clear all personal data stored in Laptop hard drive?
It is highly recommended that user should take backup of all important files and folder from laptop hard drive before disposing it. One can maintain backup using cloud service or external drives like USB drive, external hard drives, etc. Let one thing be clear; simply erasing files from laptop hard drive won’t erase everything permanently. Anyone can easily recover such data using some data recovery software.
Following are some steps which user should carry out to erase files from Laptop:
- Uninstall programs like Microsoft Outlook as it may contain some personal information
- Delete browsing history as browsers may save information about browsing history and may also save username and password to some particular sites.
- Laptop hard drive data should be wiped out completely so that stranger cannot access the data stored in it.
However, users may delete data from laptop by using Shift Delete combination keys or may format the hard drive to erase data from laptop before disposing. But this does not remove files from the laptop permanently and strangers can easily recover it by using some third party data recovery software. After reading this information, you might be thinking how to completely erase my laptop before re-selling, donating or recycling, in order to prevent misusing of data from it. The easiest way of erasing laptop hard drive is few clicks away, you just have to use Remo Drive Wipe tool. It will wipe out all the information from laptop by using shredding patterns and make the recovery impossible by any data recovery utility.
