Clean up old computer

Presuming you are recycling it by giving it away, you will probably want to erase the drive. The best way short of having whatever the military uses is probably to run a manufacturer's utility to write "0"s to the drive and do this several times. You might try to recycle it without the drive if security is important enough. A 3 pound hammer is about all it would take to do a decent job then.

Since the machine does not work there is no graceful way of cleaning the HD with that machine.

You could move the HD to a working machine and run a zeroing tool on it.

You could remove the HD and pop off the cover and take a small hammer to the platters.

Removing the HD pretty covers any data getting into the wrong hands. -OR- Place the HD into another system by itslef and run a pgm. call "killdisk" available free and simple to use at http://www.killdisk.com (free/demo version) and run it several times and return the HD to old system with a measure of confidence.

good luck -----Willy