Greg's Corner

Don’t make this mistake when selling your computer

So you’ve decided to sell your computer or laptop online. Before you post that ad online you want to make sure of one thing. You want to make sure that none of your personal information is left on the hard drive. Now you may think you have just because you deleted all your personal files. Unfortunately, that doesn’t actually delete the files, it moves the file to a section of the computer’s hard drive where it waits to be replaced by some new data. If your old computer were to fall into the wrong hands after the sale, your personal information could be compromised.

What you should do before selling your computer online is to first backup all your data. You can backup your data to either USB thumb drives, an external hard drive or a cloud based backup service. Then you need to reformat your hard drive. How to do that depends on what kind of operating system (Windows or Mac) that your computer uses. There are several utilities and resources available online that will help in either reformatting your hard drive or permanently deleting the previously deleted files on your computer.

It may be a difficult chore in reformatting your hard drive before selling your computer but a few minutes of difficulty can prevent a lifetime of headaches.