Selling a laptop on ebay

AVD · 13-09-2011 01:13AM #1

If i sell a laptop on ebay with no hard drive is it possible for someone to get my personal information from the laptop,
Credit card details etc?

Allyall · 13-09-2011 02:36AM

Highly Unlikely..

RAM is cleared when you switch off the machine...

BUT..

Most people know that the contents of RAM are lost when a machine powers down. The paper notes, however, that this process isn't instantaneous. In their tests, the authors found that various forms of RAM take anywhere from 2.5 to 35 seconds to reach a null state (newer RAM got there faster). That process is temperature-dependent; dropping the RAM to -50°C cut the rate at which memory was lost to 0.1 percent per minute. If that temperature seems hard to reach, it's not. The researchers achieved it by turning a canned air dispenser upside-down and spraying it on the RAM chip. Dropping the chip in liquid nitrogen kept the error rate at a similar level for up to an hour.

LINK

I'd imagine you would have to be extremely paranoid, to imagine that somebody would go to that trouble, to pay their hard earned money, to get a scrap of data, about somebody that they know nowt about.

Short answer is no.

Long answer is yes, possibly, but it's hard, a long progress, it will prove worthless, and it's pointless to anyone.

If you are really worried, then stick a drive in and overwrite it with games.

Drakar · 15-09-2011 11:49AM

To be fair, to allow that to happen, you have to turn off the machine, pack it in liquid nitrogen and deliver it to them in an hour. That's not usually one of the delivery options on ebay.

Selling a laptop on ebay

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