Good Price Used Laptop...plus intrinsic benefits.

[alfsauve]

Here are all my old, deactivated disc drives.   Yes with a very special rig, and after you polish out the burrs and scratches, you might be able to recover some blocks of data.  But I doubt I have anything worth spending that amount of time and effort on.

[Big Frank]

I don't know about the discs in disc drives but CDs and DVDs placed in the microwave oven and nuked for a few seconds are FUBAR. It looks like they were struck by lightning. If you shut it off right after it starts zapping the disc it doesn't hurt the microwave. I've had mine for about 31 years and it still works after destroying some DVDs.

Also degaussing is supposed to erase any type of magnetic disc.

[Pathfinder]

Couple of things:

I bought a 3-year old laptop with dual i7 processors (i3 is way slower) with 8gig memory and 1TB disc AND touch screen for $240 from a local pawn shop. Yeah, it ain't hardened but then neither am I! I also upgraded the RAM to 16G and installed windows 10 on it (like I had a choice!  ). I'm typing this message on that very computer. Check your local pawnshops.

2. After 30+ years in IT I can tell you the ONLY way to destroy a hard drive (and yes, copiers have hard drives in them) so no one can recover the data is to shred them. There are services that do this, and the protocol is very serious - matching serial numbers numerous  times through the process with client sign-offs at each step of the process, etc. The process starts with the drive drilled with a 1/2" drill bit through the platters, and then off to the shredder.

You can degauss a drive, store a large magnet next to it (or on it), format it multiple times, and the data can still be retrieved. It will be progressively harder to do, but it all depends on how badly you want to get that data.

If GD sold the laptops, my money would be on the drives having been replaced with the originals shredded.

[Pathfinder]

I just read the eBay add, and NO, do not go for these. Here's why:

1. They are FIVE years old, way too old for anything other than stuffing into a Faraday box "just in case"

2. They use Sold State Drives (SSDs) and did I mention they are FIVE years old? SSDs from back them were awful, with high failure rates if written to frequently. On my desktop, I have a 500G SSD and I still have the windows swap file on my spinning platter hard drive, not the SSD. And that's with a modern SSD, not a FIVE year old one.

3. The SSDs are only 120G - you can barely get windows on that plus maybe MS Office and then they're full.

4. Windows 7 was a decent OS, but it's no longer supported IIRC, so security updates ain't happening. Any remaining zero-day exploits are up to you and your anti-virus to contain - forever.

5. Don't know if it is at all upgradable - more memory, different (and bigger) hard drive, Windows 10 compatible, etc.

[Big Frank]

Windows 7 is still supported. I have it and there are updates on average once a week. One in March was to fix a vulnerability that allowed the ransomware that just hit 150 countries. I also have Malwarebytes which almost guarantees I won't get any ransomware if the Widows updates didn't prevent it. I don't fully trust any OS.

[Sponsor]

[alfsauve]

Question about these laptops:

Will they get special scrutiny by TSA at airport checkin?  With all the concern about laptop explosives will this particular type of laptop be more suspect?

[Rastus]

I purchased one and I love it.  It's impact resistant, touch screen, visible in limited sunlight without a lot of trouble.  120 GB isn't a big deal to me....it has plenty of room left for things I want to store plus I have a couple of 128 GB thumb drives ($25-$30) to store files on. 

My purchase was because if there is an EMP I'll still have something to look at old pictures on.  I keep pics and important scans and pdf's on thumb drives inside a faraday cage so....so long as I can get a computer I can access what is on the thumb drives.  With old tubby in North Korea one never knows.....

[Jim Kennedy-ar154me]

There is software that will "scrub" a hard disk multiple times with different patterns of data that will effectively erase a hard disk. Bleach bit is the first that comes to mind. By replacing the pattern of data multiple times (can be up to hundreds) the "original" data is not recoverable from that disk. Bleach Bit is what Hillary used to delete her emails and as I understand it they have had to go to backup drives, cloud storage, and the recipients' email clients to recover what they have. Any magnetic data media can be overwritten to the point that original data on it cannot be recovered.  IMHO