Clean Up Your Old Mac Before Passing It On

Old Macs rarely go to the dump. They usually go to other people so there are a number of things you should do to it before you sell or bequeath it to someone else. These things are: de-authorize the computer from your iTunes account, back up the entire drive contents, wipe the entire drive not just "erase" it. The songs you paid for from Apple's iTunes Music Store can only be kept on five different Macs so be sure to deauthorize the old Mac to keeep the five alive. You never know which file you might need so it's best to copy all of them and keep them for at least awhile until you are sure you will never need them. Finally, wipe the entire hard drive by booting from the OS X CD and using "Zero all data" under the options button for Erase in the Disk Utility. More... [Dana Baggett]