Help with Preparing Laptop to be Discarded

I am preparing to dispose of an old laptop.  Would anyone have a suggestion on steps/tools I could use to ensure the hard drive is completely clear?

It is a Compaq Notebook X1030US

Running Windows XP Version 5.1

I did find two discs that cam with it:

• Drivery Recovery CD
• Operating System CD

Dispose how? If you are going to junk it, then remove the drive and whack it with a hammer a few times.

If you are going to give it to someone (not many people would want an old XP computer) then formatting the drive when you reinstall XP should be sufficient if you do a log format and not a quick format.

If you are OC about these things you can run a program that does a multi-pass wipe of the drive before you reinstall XP.

DBAN is a good choice for htis.

CCleaner … https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner…. (use the free version) … has a drive wiper in the Tools section.

Tools > Drive Wiper

Set Wipe to "Entire Drive" (all data will be erased)

Set Security to "Advanced Overwrite" (3 passes)

Select the Drives you wish to overwrite.

Click Wipe

Not used this function myself so can't say how effective it is, or whether the current version of CCleaner is still compatible with XP.