@ Jace; the old computer was left at Staples. They have a computer recycling program.
It looks like that's what Jace was afraid of in his post, if whoever that worked at Staples had bad intentions they could look through the old hard drive and find stuff like SSNs (Social Security Numbers), banking info, passwords, addresses, emails, etc and use it in
identity theft fraud, and even sell that data to others.
Personally I keep all my old hard drives for this reason even if I'm not using them but formatting a drive by rewriting lots of random data (such as by
DBAN) should wipe the drive clean enough so people can't pull data off it.