You might be surprised at the prices you can get even for older or damaged devices plenty of repair shops and people needing parts happily scavenge broken down gear.

If there's no one to take the redundant hardware off your hands, stick it on Ebay, Craigslist, or your selling platform of choice. Chances are you don't need to worry too much about wiping a device you're giving to a nephew or niece, either (though you never know.). Most obviously, you can simply pass it on to a friend or family member, who can make good use of it and save another laptop or phone from being built, as well as saving you the hassle of disposing of it. You don't necessarily have to get rid of your old gadget in fact, it's better if you don't. Follow those links, log in, and look for the option to sign out of a session or remove a device to make sure it's disconnected from your key apps and services. Most apps and services- Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, Microsoft and more-let you do this. But to be absolutely sure, you can log in on a different device and log out of other sessions remotely. If you've followed the steps above, it's going to be very, very hard for anyone to log into your Facebook, for instance. Perhaps just as importantly, you need to disconnect the devices you're about to discard from your various your online accounts. You can also find specialist facilities that will take care of the destruction for you, but again, this is only really necessarily if have extremely sensitive data on your machine, or a reason to suspect that someone has specifically targeted your old electronics. The average Ebay buyer or computer recycling facility employee likely isn't going to go to the trouble of putting together a complicated hard disk recovery setup, just on the off chance that they might stumble across some of your home movies or budget spreadsheets.Д«ut if you want to be absolutely sure nothing can be recovered from a drive, US-CERT recommends actually physically destroying it-a hammer or drill will do the job well enough, but wear some safety goggles. It's up to you whether to take the risk and leave it at that. not an SSD), certain bits of data may still be recoverable by tech-savvy users with the right tools. If your computer uses an older, mechanical hard drive (i.e. For most devices using flash or SSD storage, that should be enough to stop all but the most determined data recovery experts.

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