Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Karen: I have several old computers in my basement that I want to recycle.
I’ve always heard that you need to destroy a computer’s hard drive before you recycle it to prevent someone else from maybe getting your files.
My question is will removing the hard drive from a PC completely eliminate any possibility of someone finding my old files.
If the hard drive in your computer is typical, it makes a distinctive sound that you probably learned to recognize once you had used your computer for a day or two.
The sound coming from your hard drive might be a quiet, smooth hum that you can barely hear (if you can hear it at all) or a slightly louder sound, but whatever sound it makes it should make consistently with very little deviation. [Read more…]
Many of the questions I receive at RicksDailyTips deal with replacing hard drives and SSDs.
After all, drives go bad and they have to be replaced, and folks are always wanting to upgrade their drives to something larger and faster.
I guess that’s why one of my most frequently asked questions is “How do I clone a hard drive (or SSD)?”
Well, today I’m going to answer that question by briefly describing two drive cloning methods that I’ve written about in the past.
Those two methods range from “inexpensive, and slightly complicated” to “just slightly more expensive, but dead-simple“: [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
A while back I wrote this post that explains how to convert an unused internal hard drive into an external USB 3.0 drive.
That has turned out to be one of the most popular posts I have ever written, but a lot has changed since then.
I receive hundreds of tech questions every week, and the one I seem to get asked most often is how to retrieve the files from the hard drive after a PC goes belly-up.
My answer always depends on which part of the computer has failed.
If the hard drive itself is the component that died, you’ll have to either send the drive off to a data recovery service or purchase a data recovery software utility and attempt to recover the files yourself. [Read more…]