Eraser
How many of you know that when you delete a file it really doesn’t get deleted even though it does not appear on your drive. There are utilities which can recover these kind of data from your computer. Here is an open source tool which can truly erase the data.
Eraser is an advanced security tool for Windows, which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 2003 Server and DOS.
Eraser is Free software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License.
The patterns used for overwriting are based on Peter Gutmann’s paper “Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory” and they are selected to effectively remove magnetic remnants from the hard drive.
Other methods include the one defined in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual of the US Department of Defence and overwriting with pseudorandom data. You can also define your own overwriting methods.