------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: This version uses the new installer. You Must remove versions 5.5 and below by executing a.) unwise/unwise32.exe in the eraser directory or b.) add/remove from the control panel. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Eraser 5.82 (December 26th 2006) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS 1. LEGAL 1.1. Copyright 1.2. License agreement and Disclaimer 1.3. Digital signature 2. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS 2.1. Libraries 3. HOW TO INSTALL & UNINSTALL 3.1. Before installing 3.2. Installing 3.3. Help? 3.4. Uninstalling 4. DESCRIPTION 5. AUTHOR 5.1. Web site ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. LEGAL 1.1. Copyright Eraser Copyright © 2002-2006 by Garrett Trant. All rights reserved. Eraser Copyright © 1997-2002 by Sami Tolvanen. All rights reserved. All registered and unregistered trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective holders. 1.2. License agreement and Disclaimer This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. 1.3. Digital signature The setup program is signed with Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) (public key available at web site) for verifying the authenticity. The signature file should be included with the archive. This file has the extension '.asc'. If you did not receive a separate digital signature file with this archive, download the official binary distribution at the home page (see section 5.1). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS This version of Eraser runs on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP and later. 2.1. Windows Common Control Library (COMCTL32.DLL) You must have version 4.72 or later version of the Windows Common Control Library in order to use Eraser. If you are using Windows 95 or NT and have not installed Internet Explorer 4.01 or later, you must download an update at: http://www.heidi.ie/common/ Later versions of Windows come with the updated library. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. HOW TO INSTALL & UNINSTALL 3.1. Before installing Be sure to uninstall any previous version of Eraser before installing. Also make sure you have the required libraries installed before running setup (see section 2.1). If the setup program asks you to reboot Windows after installation, you must do that before running Eraser. 3.2. Installing EraserSetup.exe is a self-extracting executable containing the program files. Run EraserSetup.exe to install Eraser. The setup program will extract the files and copy them to a desired location. 3.3. Help? After installing, you can open the help file (in the Eraser directory) by double-clicking the ERASER.HLP file. You can also get answers to some frequently asked questions and read a step-by-step installation instructions at Eraser home page (see section 5.1). 3.4. Uninstalling You can uninstall Eraser normally via Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs. You should not remove the files manually because the settings in the registry would not be removed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. DESCRIPTION Eraser is an advanced security tool, which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. You can drag and drop files and folders to the on-demand eraser, use the convenient Explorer shell extension or use the integrated scheduler to program overwriting of unused disk space or, for example, browser cache files to happen regularly, at night, during your lunch break, at weekends or whenever you like. 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 the magnetic remnants from the hard disk making it impossible to recover the data. Other methods include the one defined in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual of the US Department of Defense and overwriting with pseudo-random data up to one hundred times. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. AUTHOR The new maintainer of this product is Garrett Trant. For more information visit http://www.heidi.ie Sami Tolvanen, the original author of this software is a student in the university of technology in Finland. For more information,visit his home page at http://www.tolvanen.com/sami/. 5.1. Web site You can download the latest version of Eraser and the required libraries at Eraser home page. http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/ -----------------------------------------------------------------------------