Hi guys,

We're taking our old PC to the recycling depot. Can anyone suggest what we should do remove any personal information from it?

Thanks so much for your suggestions!

(It's very old and slow to fire-up).

Remove the hard drive. Re-engineer with a lump hammer. Sorted.

removing the hard drive is about all you need to do

either that or take it to an incinerator

Remove old hard drive and place in new computer
You can never have too much storage
No need to destroy it

Depends how big it is. I think I have a 200MB drive kicking about from back in the day when that was big storage. No real need to hook that guy up.

I once doubled my capacity from 10 to 20 MEGS. Not GIGS, megs ! It was an IBM XT clone back in the mid 80s. The 5 1/4 inch drives were as heavy as a brick ! Ah, the good old days.

Ha !!
I remember my first 20 mb hard drive
That seemed like enough storage to do for centuries !

My first notebook I was debating between 20MB HD or 120MB, and I assumed 120MB is a ridiculous amount of storage, so went for the lower amount. How wrong was I! And when I think of the price, it was practically a month's salary to buy one, whereas now they are practically giving notebooks away.

Ha. I remember when cassette tapes were the storage medium & increased the RAM on my ZX81 from 1k to 16k by plugging in the external ram pack. A finely engineered device that "wobbled" just as you labouriously entered many lines of basic on the crappy membrane keypad so you lost it all. Them were the days.

You don't know your megabytes from your kilobytes :P

See. It was so long ago. Megabytes seemed like an impossible dream back then!

I started learning to program in BASIC on a second hand VIC 20 in (I think) 1982. Cassette storage, 3.5K RAM mostly taken up by the operating system. I think there was about 1.1K of usable RAM.

Then I graduated to a 32K RAM Commodore PET upon which I was tasked to write an instrument control/data acquisition/data analysis thingy for a tuneable diode laser spectrometer.

This was actually possible, but only by relying very heavily on pokes and peeks to the ROM based BASIC floating point routines.

Using the latter profitably motivated me to rewrite the whole business in 6502 assembler language, written on a new fangled IBM XT (with TWO! floppy drives) and downloaded (RS232 serial bus and cross compiler) to a 65C02 based standalone microprocessor whose operating system I wrote myself.

Them was the days.

ah yes, when floppies were floppy

You silly old man.