[Gllug] Securely disposing of old hard drives

[John Winters]

M.Blackmore wrote:
[snip]
> we forget just how basic are many people's computing needs with
> no point in upgrading to anything more, and often little spare cash to
> go onto the upgrade treadmill anyway

Case in point.  I was called out yesterday evening to help a neighbour 
for whom "the Internet isn't working".

I'd never looked at his computer set up before.  I found a pretty 
high-spec box running XP and IE7 with a *humungous* monitor.

 From my point of view the box was in perfect working order.  I could 
access all sorts of web-sites, run up programs and what have you.  The 
only slight complication seemed to be that his desktop (the vibrantly 
coloured hillside which XP gives you by default) didn't have any icons 
on it and didn't seem to want to accept any.

However, quizzing him I managed to work out what his problem was.  The 
*only* thing he does with it is access Hotmail, and somehow he'd got the 
wrong user ID being filled in by default on the login screen.  All he 
knew how to do was pull up the start menu, start IE, use the pull-down 
of previously visited sites to go to the Hotmail page (it wasn't even 
set as the default page in IE) and then enter his password.  Because 
Hotmail then didn't accept the password (because the user id was wrong), 
from his point of view "the Internet isn't working".

Once I'd worked out what his problem was it was of course trivial to fix 
it.  For what he was doing though, the high spec of the box and 
complexity of the installation was nothing but a burden.  As Malcolm 
says, some people have amazingly small technology requirements, and for 
them the odd 2G drive is far from redundant.  I could have given him all 
he needed from my bits box and saved him the two or three grand he'd 
obviously spent on the system.

John
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