strange_complex | Technological conquests and a data security question

I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself on the technology front today. I have:

Finally got my DVD-video and Sky-box to talk to one another. It turned out that I'd got it all set up right in the first place, but just needed to choose the A1 channel on the DVD-video machine instead of letting it sit on channel 1.
Convinced my BT Home Hub to supply full wireless coverage to my entire house, rather than just a 2m pool immediately around it. Those people who said that the key to doing this was changing the channel it was broadcasting on (dakegra first, I think, confirmed by kernowgirl's husband) were really right. Setting it to channel 6 completely transformed it from basically not really working at all to working absolutely perfectly everywhere I could want it to. Amazing.

However, I still have a technological question:

Having recently bought my laptop from Dell, I want to take advantage of their partnership with ReCOM to recycle my old desktop PC to charity. I've checked that it meets their requirements, and established what I need to do to get it collected, but obviously it's crucial to ensure that it is data-safe before it goes out of my house. So far I have:

Uninstalled pretty much every piece of software I ever installed on it, with the exception of harmless ones like Adobe Acrobat
Told both IE and Firefox to clear all my personal data (passwords, browser history, favourites etc.)
Manually deleted all internet cache files, cookies etc. just to be sure
Wiped all my old documents, pictures and music (after copying them to my new machine, natch) and all temp files
Emptied the Recycle bin
Defragmented the hard drive

For the record, I never used anything other than web-based email accounts from it, so there shouldn't be old emails stored anywhere on it.

Is there anything else I should be doing before I let someone else have it? Or is rendering what was my primary personal and work computer for a total of six years truly data-safe so difficult to do properly that I'd be better off smashing the hard-drive with a hammer and taking it to the tip?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

strange-complex.livejournal.com

Good point about Freecycle - I experimented with that in getting rid of some old stereo speakers a couple of months ago, and it worked very smoothly. I think my current plan is to see how capable I am of running one of the data-destroyers, as you say, but if it is beyond my abilities, Freecycling without the hard-drive would be a nice alternative.

From:

primitivepeople.livejournal.com

The data destroyers are quite simple - given that you don't need to use the computer again, you can't really go wrong. :) The only thing that would make me panic about using them would be running them on a machine with two drives, where one drive needs to be kept and the other wiped. The potential for disaster there would be very high...but on a single-drive machine you just want to wipe, you shouldn't have any trouble.

Does the machine you're wiping have a 3.5" floppy drive? Some data destroyers need to be booted from floppies to work.

From:

strange-complex.livejournal.com

Yeah, that's my little worry about DBAN, which

diffrentcolours recommends above. I haven't read the instructions in full detail yet, so there may be alternative methods - but it does seem to talk about booting from a floppy rather a lot. My old machine does have a floppy drive, but I seem to remember it had got rather unreliable...

From:

primitivepeople.livejournal.com

I'm sure there must be alternatives, like booting from a CD or a USB stick. Given that new PCs are sold without floppy drives these days (mine is two years old and came without one), there must be a way around it.