I recently stumbled across an article that made a very good point. If you plan to throw away or sell an old computer, be certain that all of the information on the hard drives has been erased.

When I say ‘erased,’ I do not mean that you can simply delete all of the files on your hard drive and consider yourself protected. Not at all.

The truth of the matter is that when you delete a file from your computer, the files may disappear from your list of files but behind the scenes, your computer has simply marked the disk space that the files once occupied as available to be used again, leaving the contents of the original file on the hard disk until that particular space has been used to store another file.

It is very possible to recover files that you thought were deleted using special programs and techniques. If you simply delete your files before handing your old computer over to someone else — be it the trash guy or someone who wants to buy it — you should be certain that the hard drive has been complete erased.

This can be accomplished using a variety of free programs you can download and use to erase your hard drives.

My suggestion is to visit one of the big search engines like Google or Yahoo and search for “wipe disk” which should provide a number of links to programs you can use to erase your hard drives. Only then can you be sure that whoever gets your old computer will not be mining the hard drives for information that you would not want someone else to have.

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