Disk Scrubber for Windows

MariusSoft's Disk Scrubber is not anything you can't find bunches of times without trying very hard; namely, a utility designed to delete files from your hard disk until they are unrecoverable. You may not know that the things you delete from your system really aren't gone: Windows merely deallocates the physical space the deleted data occupies, and then overwrites it, eventually, in its own sweet time. But even then your deleted files can be recovered by increasingly less sophisticated means. To really remove files, you need to overwrite them many times until they're unreadable. There are several ways to do this; Disk Scrubber uses Windows' built-in cipher program. It will "scrub" any selected NTFS partition on any hard disk, leaving the data unrecoverable. Why scrub? Protection. Laptop owners should regularly scrub old but still-sensitive data; likewise anyone who sells, donates, or even throws away an old computer or disk drive should keep personal data like passwords and credit card numbers out of the wrong hands. It's plain good disk hygiene, too.

We gravitate toward simple interfaces, but Disk Scrubber's wee dialog might set the new standard: a three-item File menu, a drive selector, a status indicator, and a Start button. Despite its simple look, Disk Scrubber does offer options. And it does its job, and well.

MariusSoft's award-wining Disk Scrubber is free. It works in all versions of Windows up to Vista. It's updated frequently, and Microsoft claims that most programs that work in Vista will also work in Windows 7.