I tried those transition lenses once. They suck. They never get fully dark and don’t work in the car. Buy a second pair of prescription sunglasses from 39dollarglasses.com and just carry them with you. That’s what I did.
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You might ruin your microwave.
Can’t you just stick it in a bucket of water for a week or two? I’m guessing that would be adequate, but I don’t really know for sure.
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When I throw out old laptops I unscrew the hard drive, smash it with a hammer, and throw it away separately from the laptop.
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No that will create sparks and it won’t be good at all. There are companies in the US that wipe hard drives for you.
Can’t you just stick it in a bucket of water for a week or two?
That will ruin the electronic circuits and stuff but not the 1s and 0s.
I think taking the HD out and destroying it separately is the way to go. I’d probably need to watch a youtube to figure out how to do that though. I’d still stick the HD it in a bucket of water for a while (prior to hammering) just in case.
I think she is looking for a free solution.
There is probably free software that does it, but how sure can one be that the data is truly unrecoverable?
Ok, well I guess the water bucket is not as good as idea I thought.
Maybe just hammer?
How about fire pit?
Get a decent strength magnet or break it enough that the actual disks are broken and separated. If the drive is still accessible then just use one of the tools that writes zeroes and ones on the entire disk multiple times.
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Remove the hard drive and take a hammer to it? Unless you’re guarding state secrets on that hard drive that’s going to be sufficient for your purposes.
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You need to hammer the right spot where the data is, I think online there are videos and diagrams. Make sure you wear safety goggles.
No, I meant, if you damage the mechanical portions of the drive, no normal thief is going to go through the trouble of taking it to a place and spending money to have the platters put on a new drive on the off chance that mabye there are some credit card numbers on there that they can steal. Destroying a hard drive with a hammer is good enough, people tend to worry about the wrong things when it comes to crime prevention.
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Does this work for an SSD?
I think fire is overkill, but if you’re going to do it, make sure it’s in an outdoor area, you don’t want to breathe that in.
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At the risk of sounding like Florida man, let’s say I took the hard drive out and stuck it in my bucket of water and added some bleach or acid, to, um, how shall I put it? To acid wash it? Would that work?
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It’s harder than you’d think to really get rid of the 1s and 0s. You wind up ruining everything except the important part.
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Just do it before you remove the drive. On Windows running cipher a couple of times after you deleted your files and emptied the trash will make any data unrecoverable. SSD needs a hammer if you can’t access it anymore on a PC and some serious damage if you think the NSA wants your drive and data. Fire destroys both as long as it gets hot enough but the fumes are not good for you.
If we’re being realistic, probably the only precaution anyone needs to take is removing the hard drive and throwing it out separately, mixed with other garbage. Like, what is the scenario that people are worried about here? A garbage-picking thief who is sophisticated enough to know how to install hard drives but also willing to go through random people’s garbage bags on the off chance that they find a hard drive they can use? The odds are astronomical.
Edit: Yeah, I guess if you’re a member of an anti-government terrorist group under surveillance by the NSA, ymmv.
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Yeah. This is if you stole some state secrets and want to hide you did that and maybe a drive with your bitcoin private keys but the drive is not functional anymore. Anything you normally have on your drive just drill a hole through the the drive where the plates are. No normal thief will go through the effort to try and fix that.
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I’ve always drilled a hole through the drive and the platters.
There are dozens of free utilities and methods for wiping both magnetic and solid state drives, including some built right into Windows itself. Physically destroying things is very silly.