What is a safe way to dispose of personal info on an old laptop and what to do with said laptop?

Posted by MikeN on Super User See other posts from Super User or by MikeN
Published on 2009-09-03T12:36:30Z Indexed on 2011/01/29 15:28 UTC
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I have an old laptop someone gave me that only has 64Megs of RAM on it and runs WIN XP. I wanted to wipe the drive clean by installing Ubuntu Desktop to remove any shred of personal information on it and to make it useful to someone else. But the Ubuntu installer keeps failing because there is not enough RAM. Is there another version of Linux that would easily install on a 64 Megs of RAM system?

2nd part of question, what do I do with this old laptop? It doesn't have a battery anymore and has to be plugged into the wall to run. Assuming I can install a good Linux distro on it, who do I give it to? Salvation Army? I'm looking to just have it be useful to someone or some organization for spare parts or some basic computer usage.

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