I have a couple of old laptops lying around and want to throw them away, but have been cautious to do so because of privacy concerns of data still on the hard drives. What is the best way to wipe them? Or should I take them out and physically destroy them?

They are running windows vista and 10 I think.

  • Hildegarde@lemmy.world
    2·
    7 months ago

    A muktipass erase is the right choice.

    To do this, you will need to boot the laptops from something other than the internal hard drive. I would download a Linux distro and put it on a usb drive. Boot them from the USB then wipe the internal drives using a secure option.