My daughter is thinking of selling her old notebook laptop to raise a few £ for Christmas. Its not worth much so she doesn't want to spend money to buy software to permanently delete her personal data.

Is there any free software out there that will wipe her data so that it cannot be recovered. Obviously just pressing delete and emptying the recycle bin isn't good enough as most random geeks can recover the files.

CCLEANER from Piriform has a free version that can securely wipe your data.

Format twice and re-install the O/S. Not really sure how secure this is but this is what I've done in the past.

There's some free software out there called DBAN.

You save it to a disk and then run it in the machine, It was very well rated when I was looking for the same.

Almost any deleted software or information can be recovered.

Unless your daughter works for MI6, CCleaner would be fine.

DiskZapper but keep in mind it will completely flatten the HD

most linux live cds have a program called shred available.



this will overwrite the disk or partition 3 times (as many time as you like) with random data. It is very hard to recover data after this, not impossible... but plenty good enough.

remember any thing at the disk level will need you to install the OS from cd again..many laptops only come with a recovery partition which normally you are prompted to burn to cd when you get it....