How trustworthy are wiping hard disk programmes?
Some and some, you need the MOD approved ones if you can find them, an absolute guarantee. A hard drive is like a lot of little magnets which hold charge it is the combination of held charge or no held charge which makes up data. Ordinary wiping gets rid of a bit of the charge but a smaller level remains and can be read if you look at a lower than standard level of charge. the more the disk is wiped and re written the more of the old data charge gets lowered until finally it is below such a level that it cant be read. MOD standard disk wipes do multiple wipes and rewrites and a verification check. Just reinstalling over the top of a hard drive, can leave many areas of the disk untouched and therefore is not reliable at all. Drilling a hole through it will not wipe all the data nor will fire flood etc. a friend of mine was a data recovery specialist and he has got partial retrievals from really mashed up hard drives.
If you have Windows XP, you already have a disk cleaner & defragmenter in ALL PROGRAMS menu > Accessories > System Tools. I used the Disk cleaner to compress little used files and freed up quite a bit of space on the C drive. My PC seems to run a bit smoother.The Defragmenter will gather up scattered parts of a program & put it in one place, thereby speeding up things when you want to bring up a certain program or file, because it hasn’t got to search all over for the fragmented pieces of that program, since it is now all together. So, you need not download anything. Just use the reliable one you have, the disk cleaner being the one to try first. Do not have any programs running, nothing, just your desktop showing. Hope this is helpful.
