Old Computer

I spent a good part of yesterday going through some old boxes of goods that we have been moving from location to location and never deciding if they were worth saving. One of the boxes contained an old HP desktop computer that I bought in the 1990's and have just kept moving with us. I know for a fact that the data was removed from it way back when I replaced it with another computer, but the data still sits on the hard drive and that is a security risk if I just give away the computer.

I took the system to Best Buy to discuss options. They would copy the disk and give me a copy of the data for $250. No thanks. Another option was to remove the hard drive entirely from the system and let me keep the physical drive - for free. That was a much better option, so I now have a Western Digital hard drive that I can keep for posterity, or discard. I think I'll keep it for awhile until I see if I can somehow get the data from it, erase it, and then donate it to someone. I just saw where Seagate has a data recovery service that I will investigate. If it doesn't cost a fortune, I may pursue that avenue.

There are other boxes of goods that we are considering either selling or donating. For example, I have many albums of 78 rpm records, 33 1/3 rpm records, VHS movies and laserdiscs that we have no use for. I have to research whether there is a market for these items. Sometimes it is not worth spending a lot of time going through the steps of selling these things. I do know that we don't want to continue moving and storing these things, so a decision will be made soon on those items.

Josie is bringing boxes home every day from the shop, so we are gaining on the number of boxes needed to do our packing. I suspect that we will still end up buying more from U-Haul or Home Depot before it's all over...