How to safely dispose of a laptop?

I’ve got a couple of old laptops in the garage that I wouldn’t mind getting ride of, but how to do it so any information about me and my family isn’t stolen by somebody digging around in bins?

All photos, documents etc are backed up but now I want rid of them

Fire is your friend here.

Water equally so.

Google how to take the drive out.

Put a drill through the platters of the drive.

Take rest of laptop to local recycling centre or post it to a waste recovery firm.

You’ll get plenty of recs about doing a government wipe, but I’d just take the HDD (or HDDs) out, put it on a hard surface and give it a good hard whack in the middle of the casing with a cold chisel.

edit – happy to be wrong, not a single wiper so far in 10 posts!

Put it in a bucket of this…

Then post pictures.

Probably not safe, or actually disposing of it, but it would be satisfying!

Sudocrem and pudding, both in good measure.

Why is everybody so destructive? Just use dban and see if a charity would like it. Contrary to popular belief, criminals can’t generally be bothered using the forensic techniques necessary to get data off a disc which has had a fairly basic wipe applied to it.

You’ll get plenty of recs about doing a government wipe

You’ll get plenty of recommendations for various acts of violence which might or might not make any difference.

The thing is, there’s “actually safe” and “safe enough.” Drilling through the platters or whatever will leave quite a lot of data intact, which is potentially recoverable. However, such recovery is also very expensive, so for practical purposes you’re unlikely to be the target of such an attack unless you’ve got valuable corporate data on there.

The easiest way would probably be to run a factory restore on it. This will hose all your data and set it back up as it was when new. This could leave data behind which is recoverable by forensic methods, but really is safe for all practical purposes. Depending on the age, someone might then find a use for them, charity shop maybe?

The best way is DBAN. Copy it to CD, boot off it, let it do its thing.

Take out the HD and take the rest of the laptop to the recycling centre/dump.

Put HD in a drawer at home. FWIW I’ve about a dozen in my drawer covering the last 20 years or so.

Burn it.

if you want to be a bit geeky, keep the disk intact to give it to charity or whatever, download a linux to a pen drive and do a low level format on it.

I take a hammer to drives and put the rest to the recycling. It’s good enough.

DBAN [/url] it and then take it to a local charity shop, last time I got rid of some hardware Age UK were taking PC’s

The best way is DBAN. Copy it to CD, boot off it, let it do its thing.

Seconded/thirded. Probably more effective than a hammer or fire to be honest.

Why is everybody so destructive? Just use dban and see if a charity would like it. Contrary to popular belief, criminals can’t generally be bothered using the forensic techniques necessary to get data off a disc which has had a fairly basic wipe applied to it.

+1 for that. If it still works, why break it?
Someone else may have a use for that. You could sell it for a few quid on Ebay or Gumtree, or easily get rid of it on Freecycle etc.

DBAN or remove+hammer technique for me in the past. Do charities take old lappys without an OS? I’ve got one I need to get rid of – not quite good enough for Ebay, too good for the tip really.

Do charities take old lappys without an OS?

I doubt it. Bang Linux on it?

If it’s got a decent size drive in it, buy one of those cheap caddies for it of e-bay, format it and use it as a portable HDD.

Contrary to popular belief, charities don’t want your ancient e-waste.

But that said, a single pass of DBAN is sufficient.

wood burner – my parents put the hard drives of several computers in….

only trace was 3 big blobs of aluminium!!!

Some do – depending on how ancient. Normal ones might not appreciate them being dropped off at their high street shops, but there are specialist charities reusing old computer kit.

The strange thing with all these recommendations for methods which are a lot more hassle than just using dban is that as cougar pointed out, most of them are also less secure. Honestly the only people likely to be getting data off a drive after a single pass with dban are government agencies (the sort of forensic techniques involved are significantly more complex than those required for drives which have simply suffered physical damage but have largely intact platters), so if you’re not on their radar it’s completely secure.

But that said, a single pass of DBAN is sufficient.

Yep and you don’t have all the mess to deal with, if you have anger issues and need to break something then try hammering some rocks for a while

Yank HDDs and use a Caddy to retrieve any useful contents, format and keep for future emergency backups etc…

Then disassemble the rest of the laptop and bung all the individual parts on eBay, people will buy parts to keep their own aging laptop running, covers, screens, keyboards, RAM, motherboards, heatsinks and fans, CD/DVD drives… An old, dead laptop is pretty worthless, but parted out for a few quid an item it can make you a couple of quid back…

Plus you get to tear an old laptop apart.

I doubt it. Bang Linux on it?

That had occured to me but DBAN + hammer + skip I think. Don’t need any more computers and I work in IT so can’t be bothered.

Screw parting it out, unless you really need that extra couple of quid you’re better off just selling them as complete units. Someone will buy them.

Not quite good enough for ebay is always good enough for ebay. Seriously.

No need for the hammer.