Question about deleting a user account

[tomdkat]

I'm helping a friend get her 13" MacBook ready to sell. It's got OS X 10.5.8 installed on it. I did some searching here and found this thread:

http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-s...4-hod-do-i-clear-all-personal-user-files.html

I like Mikuro's idea in the last post of that thread and wondered if that's a good way to go. Here is his post:

A simple, but still effective approach would be to simply create a new, empty user account, and then delete your old ones.

All your personal settings should be stored within your Home folder. Other things, such as applications and their system-wide support files, may be stored elsewhere. You might want to poke around your /Library folder. You should probably remove everything in /Library/Caches, at least.

You should also erase your Spotlight index.

After erasing everything you don't want, open Disk Utility, select your disk, go to the Erase tab, and select "Erase Free Space". This will give you the option of scrambling all unused data on your disk, so your erased files cannot be recovered.

I don't have the OS X install DVD so reinstalling isn't a convenient option.

Your thoughts?

Thanks!

Peace...

 

[Giaguara]

Always store the discs that came with a computer in a safe place. You'll need for any possible reinstall, possible repair installs - and moments like when selling your computer.

If you can't find the discs now, creating the new account, deleting then your old account (when logged in as new), and erasing all empty space is the minimum to do. A complete clean system install would be much better, but when that can't be done, well, then Mikuro's method is the next best thing.