Completely destroying all data on a Hard Drive

Posted on by Brad

A few days ago while clearing through some old boxes of computer equipment I discovered an old hard drive. This drive had been removed from an old computer that had been disposed of. At the time of disposal I copied all information from the old computer its replacement and kept the old hard drive as a backup in case something went wrong.

Now more than five years later I no longer need the backup and want to dispose of the physical hard drive. But first, I want to ensure that the drive is completely clear of the old data. Connecting the drive to my current computer it can still mount and read the old drive and I can see all the old files on it. It’s good that the backup has lasted this long but to completely wipe the drive of all this old personal data is a little more complex than just selecting all the contents and pressing the delete button or doing a reformat under Windows.

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The Control Centre – 2013

Posted on by Brad

For the past seven years, every two years, I have posted a photo of my “control centre”, aka my home computer setup. Only this time, by mistake, it has been three years since I last posted. So below is the control centre in 2013.

Control Centre 2013
Control Centre 2013

The changes since the last post have been the addition of a 23in monitor, new keyboard and mouse and a new main system.

Getting USB Browser Mice to work in Vista

Posted on by Brad

I have had this issue with a number of mice and a number of different computers now. Some older USB mice will not work when you plug them into Windows Vista. What happens is a dialog appears saying installing software and then fails saying unknown device.

The fix for this as I just found out this morning is quite simple:

  • Click on start
  • Right click on computer
  • Select properties
  • On the left side of the dialog that comes up select device manager
  • Scroll down the list of devices to the known device
  • Right click and select Update Driver Software
  • Select chose from a list of drivers
  • Select Human Interface Device
  • Select HID compliant mouse
  • Click okay and the mouse should now work

Simple. And Windows had the drivers to make it work all along! Sometimes Windows does some really simple things wrong and as a result is just so frustrating. It is a mouse it should just work!