Cleaning harddrive?

[Earl]

I want to sell my laptop but i'm paranoid someone will get hold of credit card information and such after reading some article or other... anyway, is there some sort of program that will wipe it enough times so it isn't readable?

 

[Clown]

Use a warm damp cloth.

 

[JingleBells]

This should do the trick

 

[Yaka]

that totaly wipes the hd or does it leave the winxp partition most lappys have for reinstalling xp?

 

[smurkin]

This should do the trick

Bugger, thats hazardous. I wonder if it would deploy from a usb chip.

 

[rynnor]

I want to sell my laptop but i'm paranoid someone will get hold of credit card information and such after reading some article or other... anyway, is there some sort of program that will wipe it enough times so it isn't readable?

Actually no, there are various pieces of forensic software that can recover data no matter how many times it gets wiped and re-written over - the only sure way to protect data is by physically destroying the HD.

The wipe X times stuff is good enough if your selling to the average Joe though...