According to the Federal Trade Commission, an identity theft is reported every 6 minutes. One reason this occurs at such an alarming rate is that many computer users are under the false impression that they have permanently deleted the contents of their hard drive when in fact the information remains available. The article explains that as computers become out-dated and discarded, identity thieves purchase old computers at thrift stores and mine the computers for valuable personal and financial information about its previous owner. Many computers with valuable information on them are simply discarded because the owner believes that simply repartitioning and reformatting disks will permanently erase files. However, the files still exist on the computer and are available to those who know how to retrieve such data. The article explains that the only way to permanently erase data from a hard drive is to overwrite all sectors of the disk with artificial information. The remainder of the article describes how to overwrite and sanitize a personal computer before it is discarded. The article presents the technical information in an easy to follow format for non-technical readers.