File deleting.

[gorper99]

I am getting a new puter.How do I delete all of my personnal files etc. from my old puter and put things back to when I purchased it?Am giving old one away and want to make sure no personnal info is left on it.

[mcgeeb1215]

Do you have a quick restore disk? If so use that. Basically one way to make it back to the way it was is to reinstall windows. I don't know of any program that will find and delete personal files, but maybe there is one. Besides if you are giving your computer away, it would be nice to have a fresh copy of windows on the hard drive anyways.
Is there one type of file that your are looking for on your computer. If you have a lot of Word documents do a search. Click Start on your desktop, search type in *.doc. Make sure you are on the C drive so you serach the entire hard drive. This should show you all of the .doc files on your hard drive. Do this with other files types if you wish example: *.xls (Excel).
Hope this helps.

[Penguin]

The best way is to wipe the hard drive clean and reinstall everything. If you are going to this, make sure you have all the drivers needed for your hardware. Also check out this site to show you how to FDISK.

http://www.muisejt.com/fdisk/fdisk.html

Also, if you don't want to re-partition the drive you don't need FDISK. Just boot into DOS mode (start > shut down, restart in dos mode) and type

format C: /q

Now you can do a fresh install of Windows

[gorper99]

How do I wipe the hard drive clean?

[Penguin]

Go to the link in my previous post. It will explain how to FDISK, which will wipe the hard drive clean.