Computer advice requested - Disk Wipe utilities

[never cry wolf]

First, happy holidays to all my fellow DUers!!

Second, thanks in advance for any insight anyone can offer me. Here's the situation, I have a good friend that I correspond via email and IM with, she is my old high school flame and my current best friend. She happens to be married to an extremely jealous and paranoid, alcoholic husband and uses their home business computer for our correspondence. She is concerned that if she ever files for divorce their will be remnants of deleted mail and IM that could be used against her (we really ARE just friends but extremely close friends and have at times slipped into expressing wishes that, well...)

I have looked into disk wipe utilities such as DriveScrubber and BCWipe but really do not know much about them. The computer has all of the business accounting and other files which need to be maintained. Her computer guru told her that a disk wipe utility wipes everything out.

Here are my questions; is that true or can you just disk wipe all files that have already been deleted? Can anyone suggest the best utility (most used friendly) that may be able to do what I am looking for?

Thanks again!!

[olacan]

1. I

Think Diskkeeper will do this as it defrags the drive.

[Tempest]

2. BCWipe

Easiest and best program (free) available.

Another program is KODiskErasure. It'll wipe out an entire drive.

[never cry wolf]

6. Thanks, but I don't want the entire drive wiped

Just files that are already deleted leaving everything else intact. Do these allow that in a user friendly manner?

[Occulus]

3. tedious, but it works

You'll need to backup and reformat your hard drive before doing this.

Writing a batch file (or get a guru to do it for you) that writes a small text message into a file (ex. 0000001.txt), saves it, then writes the same message to a different file (ex 0000002.txt) and saves it. Make the batch file do this until the entire drive is full of these little text files. It might take a day or two, but when it's finished, there's no possible way to recover what was there before because the entire disk has been overwritten.

Mind, I've never done this process myself, but I work with a man who was a tech support employee at a nearby computer store for a few years. He claims it's the only way to truly defeat data-recovery software, because the data is simply no longer there.

If you want to wipe out information that may be incriminating, by no means rely on simple deletion, as that only removes the information about the file from the allocation table- the actual data is still on the drive until that part of the drive gets overwritten.

The above method will replace those 'lost' files with simple text over the entire drive.

[velocity]

4. Eraser

is free and easy to use

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

[never cry wolf]

7. Thanks, looks promising...n/t

[OldSoldier]

5. Norton Speed Disk does "wipe free space"

And everyone needs Norton.

[Tempest]

9. Norton Utilities

When you absolutely, positively want to hose your operating system.

Norton Utilities is a dog with more fleas than fur.

[Gman]

8. Kevlar will work very well

when he decides to come after you! :-)

[never cry wolf]

10. LOL

I am not worried about that, honestly.