My sister has given me her husband’s old laptop the deal was for me to wipe the
Hard drive, that’s no problem He works for an American company who make jets
So lots of sensitive data to erase -Just in case the h/drive won't let me do it
I'll remove it an destroy, so how much for a new one-

Dell £352.64

Ebay £29.99 + £3.85 post

Hmmm er ebay I think

I wanted a nine cell battery for my Inspiron 1545, from Dell £145 + £35 p&p.
From an outfit in Hong Kong, £35 = £10 p&p.
No guesses which I went for.

If you have an install disk with the OS on, you could use the Drive Wipe which is included in Ccleaner to delete ALL the data on the HD.

dave

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You can always tell a Yorkshireman,
But you cannot tell him much.

If you'd bought the Dell one it would probably have been Seagate or Western Digital anyway. Thieves.

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http://www.FinchfieldIT.co.uk

I do not understand why do you have to use hdd for Dell ? Any 2.5'' Sata would work.I would not risk an attempt of wiping disk if you are not 100% sure what you are doing.If that's potentially sensitive data - too much risk and responsibility on your shoulders. Get a nail and hammer and just buy another hard drive.I do not send mines back even if they are under warranty.
This is a decent hdd http://www.ebuyer.com/196786-western-di ... wd3200bpvt (to get free delivery you have to spend £50)

Typical insanity from computer manufacturers. What they would really like is for the average punter to look at the price and go oh look "that's almost the price of a new laptop" might as well treat myself. Kerrr-ching!

Just make sure you *really* destroy (into small pieces) the old hard drive if it's got super sensitive stuff on, data can sometimes still be recovered even after fires, floods, etc...

The power pack on my missuseseseseses lappy has just gone mammaries-high - typically the Dell power packs have 'intelligence' and won't allow you to swap them out with other makes/models of similar spec. I started investigating the way they did this only to throw my hands up in despair when I was measuring the continuity of the LEAD...... Tri-axial, the two 'screens' being electrically seperate until you 'do something to them' when they suddenly decide to be electrically short-circuit to each other

Thank god for eBay and cheap Chinese knock-offs

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This post may contain nuts

Thats a specialist hard drive with fancy encription gimmicks, it's still about 150 bob over what they go for though.
You might be ok to wipe it, if you need to destroy it run an earth magnet over the platters and smash it with a hammer, only surefire way to ensure no one gets the data.

Why anyone buys from dell is beyond me, they're crap, never had a reliable dell, my parents have had 2 desktops which were always having hardware failures. And the service is dreadful, I bought a laptop from their outlet shop once to be told 3 weeks later it'd been sold a week prior to when I ordered it and I could no longer have it.
"Anything similar in stock?" Nope
"Any chance of a discount off a better model then?" Nope
"Can I speak to your supervisor?" Oh he's out at the moment
"When will he be back?" Don't know
Oh man, things exploding in head.
No apology, I eventually wrote in and got a response 2 months later which gave me a miniscule discount, by which time I'd already purchased a laptop anyway from a different company.
Rant over...