[A. F. Rayd]

Hey, can anyone help me with the following problem?

I want to give my (not so) old PC to someone and buy a new one for myself. My problem is, that the former one has been used to make credit card payments online. One of my friends means it can be potentially dangerous, because all tangent strokes while typing on the keyboard are  saved on the hard disk and can be retrieved by an experienced hacker even if the disk had been formatted and the OS reinstalled which I prefer to avoid as I am not a computer geek.

If this is true, how can I find and remove those potentially harmfull data?

I do not have and never had any banking software installed on my PC.

I am looking forward to hear from you.

A.F.Rayd

[Advertisements]

if you don't want to do a factory restore first then i'd simply suggest downloading ccleaner :- https://www.piriform...leaner/download

run it to clear all temp files etc. then run it's free space drive wipe utility :- https://www.piriform...free-disk-space

 

that's probably about the best your going to be able to do without first zeroing the drive and then reinstalling the os.

 

[terry1966]

if you don't want to do a factory restore first then i'd simply suggest downloading ccleaner :- https://www.piriform...leaner/download

run it to clear all temp files etc. then run it's free space drive wipe utility :- https://www.piriform...free-disk-space

 

that's probably about the best your going to be able to do without first zeroing the drive and then reinstalling the os.

 

[OpenSourcerer]

You can give them everything excluding the HDD if you prefer. Although your keystrokes are not saved unless there is Malware on the machine intended to do so. And the majority of spyware would encrypt or at least obscure the logs. However saved browser passwords/cookies(and any other file written to the hard disc that hasn't been overwritten with new data) could potentially be recovered. Nuking the HDD by overwriting the data on it several times and reinstalling the Operating System should be more than sufficient. There's free software available to do this. Be sure to backup your important data.

Edited by OpenSourcerer, 16 September 2015 - 10:25 AM.

[SleepyDude]

Hi,

 

Create a new user account and make it Administrator, restart the computer and log-on using the new account, delete your old account, run CCleaner to do some cleanup and also wipe the free space as terry1966 suggested.

 

If you need more detailed info about doing this please post the Windows you have.

[terry1966]

+1

 

should definitely have mentioned creating a new account and then deleting all old accounts first.