I’ve been watching a debate over the last week, or more, on one of the email lists relevant to my current professional field, Litigation Support. It all started with a comment by a computer forensic vendor in which he mentioned that they routinely buy used hard drive on eBay and use them to practice and test their forensic tools, trying to recover whatever data they can. There has been quite a controversy over whether that’s professionally ethical or not, but that’s not really the reason for this post. My feeling on whether that’s  ethical or not is irrelevant.

My concern is much more basic than that. I just thought maybe you all would want to think about where your old drives are going when you decide to get rid of a computer! Even if you reformat the drive, much of that data can be recovered with the right tools, and that’s assuming the recycling place you dropped it off at actually takes the time to do the reformat. We’ve all seen too many stories of drives not being wiped at all when they’ve been resold. Surely we all take steps to prevent that, right? On the other hand, how many people do you know who do a quick format and assume it’s clean? It’s not. Do some research, ask around,  find a secure way to wipe that drive, or, as one of my listmates suggested take the ultimate secure HD tool to it, a 12-gauge shotgun.

What other tools do you recommend to your users?  Hammers, screwdrivers to the plates, metal shredders? Let us know!

There are times when you want to give out a phone number but you do not want to give out a live direct number. This happened to me when making some contact information cards for the library classes I volunteer teach. I certainly did not want to be giving out my cell phone number to just anyone who showed up for the classes. So I dusted off something I setup a while back. Grandcentral.com.

Grandcentral is now a Google owned property. It lets you pick a phone number you can keep effectively for life. The fun then begins. You can import the contact information from your computer and teach it how to route calls based on who is calling. So you could setup one number and if it is your spouse it rings your cell number and work number effectively forwarding the call. If it is an unknown stranger you can have it go to voicemail instead. Then Grandcentral will even email you a link you can click to play any recorded voicemail. Optionally you can have it SMS your cell phone to notify you of voicemail.

You can setup rules so certain contact numbers only get forwarded to certain real numbers for you such as home, work and cell. You can do this by grouping those contacts as well.

So if you have need to share a common number but want the control to protect your direct number privacy then Grandcentral is a great tool. It is free so create an account and give it a whirl.

PS You can even change the routing rules based on callerID from the call logs. So if someone starts bugging you, just route them to call blocked… =)

Yet more records get lost by businesses this year. Some closer to home for me than others. So just to be safe I decided to track down my Fed guaranteed annual credit report. Here is all you have to do if you are a USA resident. If you go to any site but this one they could be selling you a service. This is the site the agencies setup in response to the Federal law to provide the annual free report. If you do not want to check it online you can request it via phone or mail.

A few weeks ago I had a need to uninstall some software from my XP laptop at work. I did the usual START / Settings / Control Panel / Add and Remove Programs, but it simply wouldn’t populate the list of applications no matter how long I waited.

I REALLY didn’t want to reimage my machine just because of this one glitch — let me rephrase that… I was NOT going to reimage my machine because of this one glitch! But I still needed to get a certain application uninstalled and I also didn’t want to have to manually uninstall it.

I dug around on Microsoft’s site looking for a KB article on the issue, but nothing I found offered any relief. Then I came upon CCleaner.

Not only am I able to uninstall my apps now, I can do so many other things, like… clear temporary files, URL history, cookies from IE, Firefox or Opera, but also clean out the Recycle Bin, MRU lists, temp files, and clean up the registry.

A very handy tool… and best of all, it’s freeware!