ZDNet AnchorDesk: The safe way to move your data to a new PC:
"This column is about something that every reasonably advanced PC user faces at one time or another, an exercise that's fraught with peril. "

Specifically: How do you make sure your PC is safe to hand down to someone else or perhaps to sell on eBay for a dollar or two? By "safe," I mean that all your personal data has been safely removed.

Real paranoiacs will remove the hard drive, run it past a demagnetizer, smash it with a 20-pound sledge hammer, and then soak the remains in circuit board etching solution before they pass along a PC. If you should actually catch somebody doing this, however, do us all a favor and notify Tom Ridge immediately.

If you'd rather preserve the drive, and don't care about the apps and operating system, there are a number of utilities that will completely wipe the drive. If you have a copy of Norton SystemWorks, for example, you can boot from the CD and use it to wipe the machine's hard drive.

Not all data wiping programs are created equal, however. Whatever app you use, try to make sure it makes three or more passes of the hard drive, replacing the old data with random characters each time. Such a hard drive will be clean enough for the Defense Department's purposes, whatever those might be.

BUT SUPPOSE you want to leave most or all of the applications and operating system in a condition that someone else could still use. And (to be even more realistic), let's say you'd also like to migrate all your data and settings from the old machine to one you've just purchased or received as a holiday present.…

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