On 11-07-10 6:26 PM, Mike Powell -> All wrote:
 MP> A friend of mine that is running WinXP has asked me if there is a way to
 MP> permanently delete a file from his system. He knows he can use Shift-Del
 MP> to make it look deleted, but he is asking how to completely remove files
 MP> from the system so that they can never be recovered (bank info, etc.).

 MP> I know of software that will completely wipe-out the entire HD, but I don't
 MP> know of any that do so for individual files. IIRC, the old Norton Desktop
 MP> (from WfWG 3.11 days) had a "Shredder" icon that
supposedly did that.

 MP> Is there a method to permanently delete a file, rather than moving it to
 MP> the recycle bin or otherwise leaving some recoverable footprint on the HD?

Mac OS X has a 'Secure Empty Trash' option, which deletes files and then
overwrites the space the data had taken with a pattern of zeroes and ones,
making it impossible to recover the data.

I'd imagine there's something similar for Windows, perhaps as a 3rd party
utility, though I have no names to recommend.

--- Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.18) Gecko/2