Preparing a computer for sale, what to do?

[lead_magnet]

I'm thinking of selling my desktop (HP) to try and fund an Ipad. I don't use the laptop much as it is, and everything I do on my pc I can accomplish on an Ipad. Anyway, my pc is still a good PC, its an HP pavilion Elite HPC with like 800Gb of hard drive space and I think 8gb of RAM or something, I dunno, not really a tech guy. Anyway, long story short, I want to sell the PC, but I have used it for all of my online banking and I have financial records on it as well as your average Joe stuff (ie. nude pics of the wife ), and I don't want the next guy to be able to recover my stuff. How do I prep it for sale? Is a system restore enough or do I need to pull a hard drive or do I have to just trash it? Thanks in advance, I'm not a very tech savvy guy.

[brutal]

If you're super paranoid, pull the drive and sell it as is or put in something else. They're cheap.

I would just use a good free drive/data wipe utility. There's a good list here - DBAN seems to be the current internet darling.

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolso...n-software.htm

[TFOGGER]

Free drive cleaner software:

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

http://eraser.heidi.ie/

Both can be run from a usb drive, and offer several different levels of overwrite security.

[Ah Pook]

Doing the same as we speak. It's a Mac, so I'm sure it doesn't count as a real computer.

Delete documents, pictures, contacts/phone book, history, internet files... Everything but applications/exec files.

[brutal]

Doing the same as we speak. It's a Mac, so I'm sure it doesn't count as a real computer.

Delete documents, pictures, contacts/phone book, history, internet files... Everything but applications/exec files.

If you don't overwrite deleted files, they're recoverable.

[00tec]

Do you have the hp restore discs?
Run dban, then reinstall the operating system. Running something like dban is the only way to permanantly clear everything, but the computer will be not be worth as much without the OS. Hp will sell you the restore discs for like $20.

[Danimal]

Deleted

[spqrzilla]

Used computer equipment does not really sell for a lot these days, frankly.

[68Charger]

I've seen people selling PCs with no HDD... but it will greatly reduce the price you get.

Depending on what you had on it (Financial info), I'd look at value vs getting another drive (they are cheap for desktops)

I can tell you I've done some PC refurbs for my Brother-in-Law, and we just reset the operating system, install updates and sell it... I'm sure a real good forensic software could find some data, but I seriously doubt 99% of the population has that kind of knowledge.

I don't sell PCs my own data has been on, I hand them down to my kids and they die a slow death, and the HDDs become targets before disposal.

[HoneyBadger]

I remember helping my paranoid dad smash old hard drives with sledgehammers in the late 90s... it was fun.

Now a days I like to keep them around. I generally don't sell old computers... just rebuild them, or use them until they are totally dead and worthless. I have a stack of older HDDs that I'll probably burn, smash, shoot, or otherwise destroy someday. Oh yeah, did I mention that I double-wrap two different types of encryption on all my drives?