I am planning to sell my laptop and want to know how I go about wiping out my hard drive of personal information. I’ve been told that reloading the operating software will do this.
A. The only way to be 100 percent sure that nobody with computer talents can ferret out stuff from a hard drive is to use software that writes a 0 or a 1 to each spot on the drive. Even then, Pentagon standards call for repeating the write-over several times.
The problem is that somebody with an electron microscope could scan the metal plate where hard drive data was recorded to detect what had been written over by looking deep inside the surface.
Unless you’ve made enemies with somebody who owns an electron microscope and a parallel array of supercomputers, the write-over will surely suffice.
The fix is to buy a data wipeout program like the $29.95 Drive Scrubber by Iolo Technologies (www.iolo.com).
If you’d like to explore the shareware/freeware option, check out the
Tucows website (www.tucows.com), where you can search out software using terms such as “data wipe” and “drive clean.” These tend to be fairly complex affairs that use text-based commands to do a full drive wipe.
Q. When Windows boots on my computer, it used to play a melody during startup and the same one when it shut down. I have purchased a new sound card, and now it only makes a loud thud rather than playing the melody. How do I get the music back?
Also, when I try to play a sample selection on the Amazon.com music section, the Windows Media Player (Version 9) does not work and displays the following message: Unable to perform the request.
However, the Real Audio player works fine. What can I do to make the Windows player work?
A. You can restore the out-of-the-box sound effects by clicking on Start and then opening the Control Panel icon, where you will find an entry called Sounds and Audio Devices. When you open this, you will find a tabbed menu. Open the one called Sounds, and there will be a list of all of the actions that Windows accompanies with sound effects.
When you select an action, the display will show the name of the sound file that gets played when that action occurs. A browse button nearby lets users scroll through the list of sound files in the Windows directory for the file in question. You need to select Windows Exit to find and restore that shutdown sound and Windows XP Log On for the startup.
Second: Amazon.com samples don’t play when you click Media Player because Windows isn’t set to use Media Player when the Amazon format is found.
Right-click on a sample and then select Save Target As and save it to the desktop. There, give this file with the ending of .asx a right click and select Open With. In the next pop-up, use another browse icon to select Windows Media Player and click the check box to make the change permanent.
