Safe & complete data removal?

I have a mate who has upgraded his business PC's and he's asked me to get rid of his old ones (4)

One is trash, but the other 3 are okay.

Is there a ready-made piece of software that I can get that removes all data and personal info and stuff, but leaves the O/S intact, and leaves it so the data, etc is completely unrecoverable?

Seems a bit arduous having to go through the registry, etc, looking for anything (trying to guess what 'anything' might even be) and then deleting it.

Figure someone must have designed a shareware or even pay-for program that will do this.

Probably no easy way, not that I can think of anyway, and I can't think HOW a program would know what is data to keep and what to remove - each OS installation would be different (drivers, options etc) not to mention third party apps.

The most secure way would be to just low level format the drive (write 00000000 to every cluster) and reinstall the OS - that way you can be sure there is no confidential data.

Thanks Lonewolf... I figured as much.

I've ended up with another 9 boxes from another source but they are mostly ancient (EDO Ram), so have taken the drives out of the oldest ones to get them ready for dumping and will probably introduce them to the sledge hammer.

I will follow your advice re the newer ones.

Fritzy

kill disc is nice too just run it seven times and all data gone forever.....well maybe if cia wants it but would be tough.

article
and the software (autoclave) that'll do your HD's some serious cleaning.

also you can use DBAN