Hi Mal,
Try File Shredder...
It is not that difficult to acquire, and use, data recovery software, so the only real answer to this is to remove the hard drive, and physically destroy it, and either put another hard drive in, or offload it with no hard drive.
Most laptop hard drives are fairly easy to get at and remove so as stated above, it's probably the best option if you want to be 100% sure.
Take a hammer to it and destroy it if you want to be sure.
A replacement drive is around £50 so take that off the price. You'll need to give the next owner a copy of the original disks that came with the computer as that'll have the Windows software plus all the relevant drivers to use the computer.
comes with a built in secure file shredder. ;-)
A file shredder program would be best Mal and a plan of attack.
1) Manually go through the laptop removing old programs you don't want on there.
2) Manually go through the documents of the entire hard disk and clearing all the stuff on it. This includes temporary folders and my documents in all of the user profiles. You'll also need to turn on 'show hidden folders' so you can clear out the temp files in the user profiles as well.
3) Run a clean up program to also check for unneeded files (windows install, prefetch, downloaded browser programs etc). The inbuilt one with Windows can do that for you reasonably well.
4) Setup a new Full administrator profile and delete all you other user profiles from the system.
5) Delete all system restore points.
6) Run the file shredding program and make sure it does at least 5 pass overs of each sector. This makes it very costly for file recovery to be done on the hard drive because the 'blank space' is turned into 1's and 0's so many times it won't have a memory of what 'was' there.
7) Uninstall the file shredder program.
8) Double check that you have no system restore points and no files hanging around.
9) triple check.
10) get somebody else to check for you.
11) take the hard disk out and bash it with a hammer, put it into the washing machine, throw it off a roof and then run over it repeatedly with a steamroller.
Steps 1-10 are optional.
Seriously, that would be the best stratergy to take if you want to do the clean up of a laptop. If anybody has any further suggestions it won't hurt to do them as well.
PS.
How are you at reading the registry?
Best file shredder of all is Cyberscrub. It's level 3 US cleared or something. It gaurantees to destroy files beyond forensic recovery so even if you sold it to Scotland Yard you should be ok.
Use windows explorer to delete the directories that contain personal info: pictures/music/etc.
Next, delete the system restore points:
Click "start", point to All Programs | Accessories | System Tools and click Disk Cleanup.
Click OK.
From the Disk Cleanup dialog box, click the "More Options" tab.
Click "Yes" to confirm your actions.
Download ccleaner, tick all the boxes including "wipe free space" then click "run cleaner"
Don't be so paranoid, nobody is going to spend hours and hours and hours re-constructing your files to find what you had on them in a previous existence !
If you really want to render the hard drive unusable, lend it to Dave Notts for a week.
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