Is There A Charity Which Can Rehab. Laptops?

[jourdain2]

A year ago my Acer laptop 'died'. Turned out that it was the visual display unity which hade 'gone', rest of computer worked OK. It was going to be incredibly expensive to repair and the sales were on so I bought this one and techie staff at school saved my data etc. to install on this. I assume all my old stuff is still on the old laptop. Since then the old one has sat sadly at the bottom of the stairs because I caught an indicator on R4 that there was someone/some charity that fixed broken ones and sent them to Africa where there was need.

Tried to find out who this could be. Does anyone know, please, and also how do I get my personal data off it? Thanks - it would be nice to see it of some use to someone.

[Zacs-Master]

I wouldn't even go there. Erasing data completely is very difficult. You'll probably end up with an email from Nigeria asking you to hold £2,304,593.02 for Mr Ngamu.

[KARL]

There is such a thing as cascading old/unwanted IT equipment to Africa - try turingtrust.co.uk/Africa, there will be others. Zac's caution is not entirely unreasonable but thoroughly removing data from a hard drive is not so very difficult. All you need to do is properly re-format the hard drive in/from the old computer (perhaps twice over for good measure) - to do this it may be necessary to remove it, format it separately, and then reinstall it (or simply donate the stuff "in bits"), if you cannot do this yourself, you should have no difficulty finding someone who can. At that stage the disk should be effectively blank - do not rely on simple deletion, that leaves much of the data still recoverable by those who are sufficiently knowledgeable. Do not pass the machine (or rather the hard drive) on without formatting first

[jourdain2]

Thanks very much both of you. Good advice all round. I don't know enough about computers to clean it up, but I know a chap in the village who could do it. :)

[Zacs-Master]

I hope you trust him and you didn't use the machine to store anything personal or access your on line banking account via it.

[jourdain2]

Yes, I trust him and, fortunately I don't do online banking any more. I did have it in France, but that account was closed a year ago. I decided I was too inept technologically to operate banking in with hackers seemingly everywhere in today's world!

I'll have a word and see if he reckons he can make it safe. Thank you again Z-M. :)