Help with wiping hard drive

my child's laptop(2nd hand ) came with vista on it , but i have now put win7 on it , just noticed recently that she has only 20 gig left out of the 120 gig hard drive as she says its been running slow(no virus's or malware etc) , i have a dban disk which works fine on my desktop pc and have wiped that with no problems, i tried to wipe her laptop (e-system 1201 ) with dban but it just wont do it , is there any other free software out there that would let me wipe my childs laptop, thanks

 

Hi paul70 .
Congrats on getting rid of Vista - I was never a big fan of it, I find 7 to be much more efficient and customizable . But I'm likely preaching to the choir here. TO answer your question, I would try :
http://majorgeeks.com/Advanced_Disk_Cleaner_d4352.html
While I have never needed to use this particular app, the description sounds like what you are looking for. Have a look .
If that particular program doesn't sound like what you want or need, just look at the entire list at http://majorgeeks.com/downloads12.html
and make a choice from there !
As you should already know all MG downloads are safe and tested before offered for DL .

 

Hello,
I would try FED UP's suggestion of clearing uneeded files first to see if that helps.

For reinstalling a OS, I do not think you have to wipe the drive with something like DBAN. You could use a bootable partition manager like Gparted or Partition Wizard to delete the partitions and then do a reinstall of Windows 7.

If you want a program to zero out the drive with a bootable disk similar to DBAN try this.

http://www.killdisk.com/

 

that looks good , thanks