FreeBSD I LOVE YOU

[Anthony Atkielski]

Erik Norgaard writes:

EN> Many larger companies have a fixed upgrading schedule, a pc lives 3
EN> years.

One must wonder why.  After all, they don't rebuild their offices every
three years (although some seem to replace company cars fairly
quickly--but mostly due to wear and tear, I presume, which is not much
of a factor with PCs).

EN> My consideration was that it might be cheaper to donate such pc's with
EN> new harddrives rather than go through the trouble to overwrite the disk
EN> to destroy data properly.

If one can be confident that the drive will not be opened, it's probably
safe to just wipe the drive with overwrites.  Getting any but the most
recent information off the drive usually requires opening it (although
some drives allow calibration that might get around this).

Unfortunately, most people will probably need Windows on the machine,
and unless they happen to have an old copy of Windows around to install,
an older PC may not be fast enough to suit them.  Of course, if they
want FreeBSD, no problem.

-- 
Anthony