The Top 40

Today, I would NEVER sell a computer with a unmolested hard drive in it.

About 8 years ago I sold 4 IBM Thinkpads to a dood and a year later I was regretting it. Mot that there was anything on them that shouldn't be, but that he could have put something on them and attributed it to me.

Now, what I will do is: wipe the drive, reinstall the OS, then fill the HD with thousands of copies of a generic text file.

For those that didn't know:
When you reformat a hard drive you have NOT deleted the information on it. You have simply made all of it available for more information to override the info that is already there.

Think of your hard drive as a wall with thousands of holes in it and when you save a file to that hardrive it stuffs it into 1 or more of those holes and locks the holes so that nothing else can be put in it.

When you reformat you remove the lock but do not remove the contents. Now, new stuff can be put in the holes, overriding the old.

Which holes? That cannot be easily ascertained.
So, the best thing is to fill all of them up again with something else - a generic taxt file is one way.

Generic text file: Open Notepad and create a new file and type the sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the angry dog. Copy that line of text and paste it, then copy both lines and paste them, then copy all 4 lines and paste them, over and over until you have a text file that is 20mb in size. Name that file Text01. Copy that file toanother directory and rename if Text02, do that 10 times. You get the point.

Or, just remove the hard drive and yank the cool rare earth magnets from it and ditch the rest.

anonymousconservative.com has an excellent take on this as well (Jan. 11).

All I see on that site is stuff about r/K Selection Theory.

Alexa - open mic. In your house. On the internet.

My son, the Ubergeek, takes the drive up on Green Mt and blows it to pieces with some rifle. I forget what he has.
I think he is too busy for that now, actually.