Thinking of donating my laptop

[Ondedlo]

I've had this laptop for a few years now, and want to get a new one. But my current one is quite decent, and I don't really want to discard it, so I was thinking of giving it away.

Thing is, I have a lot of personal information on this laptop, and I've read that reformatting doesn't remove it. Most people say to just destroy the hard drive, which is fine I guess. My question is, do I need to do this with any other parts of the laptop, like the Motherboard for instance, or is all the information kept on the hard drive only?

Thanks in advance.

[liljim]

Formatting the drive will be sufficient. Theres no need to destroy anything. If you dont personally feel formatting is enough, you can do whats called a low level format, also known as zero fill. This destroys all data on the drive, including partitions. All you need to do is find out who made the drive (samsung, hitachi, toshiba, etc) and download their software. Deleted files can usually be recovered, formatting is a done deal.