`Tis the season.. but don't donate that PC yet.

With the release of Windows 7 in time for the holiday buying season I’ll bet that more than one of you plan to purchase a new PC this year.. and you may already have. Congratulations! You’ll certainly

Photo by ercwttmn

enjoy better performance and increased efficiency from your new system, no doubt.  So, what do you do with your old system?  You could pass it down to a family member – many folks do that.  You could keep it and use it for the kids.  You could prop a door open with it.  The list goes on and on.  If you’re like most folks though.. you’ll gather up that old PC and take it down the street to your favorite charity and donate it for the good feeling and the tax writeoff.  If this is your plan, STOP!  Charity is a great thing.. but you need to think this through.  You have personal data on that PC.  You’ve done your online banking on that PC.  You’ve probably allowed your browser to save some of your passwords on that PC.  Just a few of the above items are more than enough information to allow someone to gain access to your entire electronic life at your expense.  Did you attempt to delete the data?  That delete key on the keyboard probably doesn’t work the way you think it does.  For example.. say I keep a Word document on my hard drive that has all of those passwords that I don’t want to forget in it.  I’ve decided after some time that I’m going to sell my old computer at a yard sale, so I go to “My Documents” and delete the file before I sell it.  The file doesn’t show up in “My Documents” anymore and I’ve emptied my recycle bin, so it is gone, right?

Wrong.  Very Wrong.

What really happened inside the guts of your machine is this: your operating system marked the spot where that file lives on disk as “overwriteable” so the space on disk can be used later.  The file is still very much there, only hidden.  Theoretically.. I could purchase your machine, take it home, remove the hard disk and plug it into my already-running PC with an adapter.  I can run one of several programs I have for examining your old hard disk and “undelete” those files.. and Voila!  I have your password file.

I’m going to do a little experiment.  I’m going to head to my local donation center and purchase a used PC.  I’ll bring it home and do just what I illustrated and see what I can see.  I’ll chronicle the experience here to illustrate what I’ve been talking about and I’ll then properly destroy what I’ve found.  Stay tuned!

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