Effort: ModerateCost: Free

Nothing can complicate your life quite as thoroughly as identity theft. So before you sell your old PC or return a bum hard drive, keep one important fact in mind: Deleting files doesn't guarantee they're gone for good. To clean your hard drive properly, you can't just toss the files into the Recycle Bin and empty it--you need to overwrite the data on the disks as well. We could get all technical at this point, but instead we'll just point you to , a free boot-disk utility that securely wipes any hard drive using any one of several tried-and-true methods. Once DBAN is done with your disk, you can be sure the data is gone.

Effort: ModerateCost: Free