By Peggy Pulliam, Secretary, Tampa PC Users Group
pegrance@yahoo.com

We had our usual Windows Special Interest Group meeting with questions and answers about using Windows and the ins and outs of that.

Our featured speaker was Gene Barlow with User Group Relations. One of the companies he represents was PowerQuest, which has just been purchased by Symantec. It is possible that they may discontinue the user group programs.

The presentation showed that research had been done by White Canyon software, which found that much of the supposedly deleted information on computers that people had donated or given away, thinking they’d cleaned them of private information, still had retrievable private information on the hard drive.

Their product, Wipe Drive, writes over the entire hard drive, leaving nothing to be read at all. Gone.

Secure Clean is a another product that selectively erases data. It leaves the Operating System and/or other programs you designate by choice to keep on the hard drive. You can scan for mistakenly deleted files; it shows you how many it has found and it will even go over email messages. This allows you to restore something before wiping it clean; you can find something you thought was lost.

Hard drives fail, so back up the system AND the data. Using an external hard drive is best for this. With a laptop you have to backup to an external drive. With a personal computer you can use Partition Magic to create extra drives to use for back-ups. Gene showed us several clever ways to back up networked computers too. The products are available at User Group special prices now, but we don’t know for how long.

Gene offered Secure Clean for the door prize which Brian Lance WON! u