Important Things To Consider Before Selling Old Computers

By Author: Rojaf Wilo
Total Articles: 4
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The computer you spent thousands on a year or two ago is now a dinosaur worth pennies on the dollar. There are two ways by which people sell used computer equipment . The first one is in one piece where the entire computer is sold and the second is to sell it in parts i.e. individual selling of monitor, hard disk, key board, RAM. The second way renders more money for the sellers. But the question comes, is it safe and secures to sell off the computer this way or does selling off an old computer require any treatment? Few experts recently found information regarding credit cards, medical reports and financial data on random hard disks bought at online auction. Hard disks containing sensitive and secret data needs to be wiped out before selling it off to other people. To make the selling of used equipment more secure data scrubbing techniques are being used.

A DOD Data Scrub exposes ...
... your electromagnetic equipment (i.e. hard disc) to sporadic magnetic fields which will overwrite your actual data with some random patterns. A good data scrub is 90% unrecoverable, and a DOD data scrub is in the amount of times the drive is overwritten over with random patterns. As it deals with sensitive and secret information at the Department of Defense, it is overwritten number of times to make it better. A proper DOD data scrubbing requires a hard drive be overwritten by seven times to be considered as unrecoverable. If anyone is dealing with any sort of sensitive or secret information, it's worth taking into consideration for a more extensive dod data scrubbing while selling of used computer equipments.

Before selling used computer equipments, few things you should keep in mind.

=>If you are going to use any of the application in your new computer, uninstall it from the old computer and make sure you have the installation disks and serial numbers.

=>Wipe out all personal information from the old computer. Use a utility program for data scrub or overwrite secret documents, then reformat the hard disk and install the operating system again.

=>Collect the original software disks and manuals for the operating system that came with the computer.

=>Find out the actual value of your computer or used equipments by following online auctions, or go through the classifieds. You can select any selling medium of your wish. Don't expect to scrape it in; old and used computers are not of much value.