I've got three very old IBM laptops at home which are taking up space, and are faulty in some way or another. One has a broken screen. The other two have hard drives which won't boot, or if they do boot it leaves you with a machine which usually blue-screens after a minute or so.
There's utterly no point in spending money to get these repaired since we've completely moved on from them and they'd be insufferably slow on the modern Internet, but unfortunately we do have some confidential data on the hard drive, but given their condition can't actually get to it to erase it. I'm not 100% sure what's on there, but there's likely to be names, addresses, National Insurance numbers and occasionally some bank details such as account numbers and sort codes.
So then... if we send these off to a recycling company, what are the odds that somebody can get at the hard drive data and potentially abuse it, even the ones that don't boot properly? Is this something I should be worried about, or should I just relax and hand over the PCs to a professional company? I was looking at this organisation here:
http://www.laptop-recycling.com but as I've never tried anything of this nature myself, I was wondering if you lot had.
Sorry for asking such a dull question, but it doesn't seem as if this is something many people I know have given thought to.