We provide this free financial resource to visitors of the Community Room of SeniorSSuperStoreS in an effort to keep baby boomers, seniors and the elderly informed of matters that can affect their lifestyle.

So, you've finally decided to upgrade to a new computer? Then you should be very careful how you dispose of that older, slower computer that was replaced.

Most of us would never think of giving a total stranger access to everything we have on our computers - things like checking account information, our investments, our old email, tax returns, our medical information.

All that, and probably a lot more, are residing on the hard drives of our computers. According to a recent article in PC World magazine, some very bad things can happen if you don't take special precautions when you dispose of your old computer and its hard drive.

PC World bought or salvaged ten hard drives in the Boston, Massachusetts area. When they examined the drives, nine of the ten contained sensitive personal information.

According to PC World:

"A Boston computer store sold us a hard drive previously owned by an accountant--and crammed with four years' worth of his clients' payroll and tax information and employee Social Security numbers. The accountant said that his nephew, who worked at a computer store, had removed the drive while upgrading his old computer several months earlier. The accountant said that he never thought to ask his nephew what had become of the hard drive.

Similarly, a Salvation Army store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sold us a PC that had once belonged to an attorney; it still contained bank account numbers, an active America Online account (and a stored password), and draft legal documents on its hard drive."

Even though 4 of the 9 users had tried to delete these sensitive files, they didn't succeed. Some believed that by simply "removing" the files from their computer, they had protected themselves. Although others took the extra step of reformatting their hard drive, the data can be recovered using one of several programs.

What can you do? PC World recommends using one of several commercially-available utilities that not only erase the data, but overwrite the hard drive so that the old data cannot subsequently be recovered.