On 04/01/18 08:53, Adrian Brentnall wrote:
On 03/01/2018 21:15, Tim Lamb wrote:
Right! The old XP box has taken up space in our hall for too long. I am
told the space is needed for a row of wellington boots in readiness for
the next GC. visit!

I'll strip out the hard drive but are any of the other bits of interest?
Free to appreciative home:-) Memory cards?

There has been occasional mention of alternative uses for PC power
supplies. I stopped playing with electronic components around the time
TTL came along so nothing springs to my mind.


I've got a few of these that were 'retired' when the current
(ex-corporate) Win10 boxes were installed in the home office.

At the moment, the XP boxes are set up just as they were on the day they
were turned off - reasonably well-specced for 'office' machines,
decent-sized hard drives.

I think I know the answer g - but is there a reliable way of wiping
any confidential info (passwords etc) without removing the XP install..?
I'd like them to go to somewhere where they'll be used, but don't
particularly want my bank account emptied or my email hacked!

Install Eraser (https://eraser.heidi.ie/). That will work with XP if
it has SP3.

You can selectively erase files or folders - not just delete but
overwrite. I used to use this years ago when I used my XP machine for
confidential business work. I don't know if it still has it, but it
could also "erase" free disk space. This was useful to clean up old
disks where there was a large amount of "deleted" file data, which might
be restorable or partly recoverable with special utilities.

Of course, erasing a large amount of data will take quite a time. If
you've got a large HD drive, running to a couple of hundred MB or more,
you will need hours to wipe it securely.

--

Jeff