re: #76 Scout

Please forgive me for going OT, but I’m getting ready to dispose of an old laptop through a recycling outfit. I have removed the hard drive and will dispose of that separately. My question is this: Without the hard drive, is there any possibility of any compromising data remaining in this computer? Like in the RAM or the BIOS or whatever?

Please understand I am very ignorant about computers.

Generally to recover anything from ram you need access to it immediately after power has been removed and you need to drop it’s temperature below freezing rapidly to preserve the state of the capacitors. That buys you a few minutes to try to pull some useful data off it, but that can be pretty hit or miss depending on what was in memory just before shut down.

For the average schmo not something you really need to worry about. Bios generally only contains system settings so not likely to be anything in there to be concerned about.