** Here be Dragons friend , trod lightly ,lest you find yourself in a flame , w/ no breath mints handy. Setting aside the fact that just to delete a files ( cc numbers , online banking records or client data ) doesn't do anything to seriously remove these items... And there is good general reasons to "cleanup" a hard drive ; tho one might not want to reinstall everything in order to do a minor *spring* ( or *fall* , even) clean .. I've located DBAN ... but that seems a bit of overkill ...( I've not finished reading all the docs , but it seems to want an all or nothing approuch ) What I require , which might not be as secure a destruction of info, I Do understand, is a program where I can remove whole FILES w/o the necessity of destroying everything.. OS/2 used to have a couple of these sorts of programs .. there are even a couple for MS products. Where after the file is "deleted" the area it takes up is overwritten a number of times w/ 1s and 0s up to a level that teh owner is "comfortable" w/ .. DBAN should make giving a computer away ( w/ a bright shiny new Suse on it <G>) a less daunting prospect than it is currently.. since the only way to be certain secure information can not be recovered is to actually destroy the drive. One should be able to feel that the average scripty won't be able to recover the info ( let if require govt * forensic* tools that is okay... BTW for those that are curious Google only turned up DBAN , for linux/uninx ... plonk the proggy onto a floppy , or cd , and boot the box w/ that ... But there should be soemthing for general housekeeping as well -- j afterthought There are more planes in the ocean than ships in the sky.