What do you do with old computers? In our house right now we have eight of them. There are two that we use daily and six that we don't. Regardless of whether we sell them or give them away they need to be cleansed of all personal data. There are two ways to do that reliably. In the case of the Mini 311 shown at the top, it is running Windows 10. I upgraded it from Windows 7 when the free upgrade offer was out there. It was the machine which I used as an experiment before doing others in my house. Windows 10 has an interesting Reset feature which will reinstall Windows 10 and delete all data on the machine. The result is a very clean installation. It is supposed to shred all the vacant disk space as well. I decided to run File Shredder (a free utility) to just make sure all is clean. So we end up with a fully functioning machine which Ginny listed on ebay.

The computer on the bottom is a HP Mini 1000. I bought it in April of 2009. The intention was to have a nice portable machine for international travel. I found there was one big fly in the ointment. It had a screen density that certain programs couldn't use and therefore would not install. Other than that it was fine. I bought the Mini 311 in April of 2010 to replace it. Anyway, the 1000 was running XP. It was not shipped with a back up operating system installation on drive D:. There was an installation disk which I tried to run and it just would not work. In the end I decided to just pull the hard drive and hit it with a hammer. There are quite a few of these machines on ebay with "No HDD." So Ginny listed the 1000 as well. We will see what happens. These two computers go to Goodwill if they don't sell.

I am excited about tomorrow because my previously mentioned 2 TB solid state drive is supposed to be delivered. Can't wait to give it a try.