When you wipe your hard drive, does it take away your Microsoft Word and programs like that? (PowerPoint?)

yes EVERYTHING will be gone

If you want to clean off your own personal stuff but leave the programs on, then you will have to go through & delete any of your own documents (usually, but not always in My Documents).

Next, delete all your emails & remove the email accounts set up within your email program.

Go into your web browser (usually Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera) and delete all your Favourites (or Bookmarks).

Now you should go to Control Panel - Add/Remove Programs & uninstall any programs you do not want to be left on the PC (such as programs that you will be installing on your new PC using the same licence code as on this one).

Running Accessories - System Tools - Disk Cleanup & selecting all items (except Compress Old Files) will remove temporary files etc. that get left lying around.

Finally, when you run your disk wipe program, it should give you an option to wipe free space but leave Windows & Program files intact.

- The alternative to all this is to wipe everything but then you'll have to re-install Windows & all the programs from the installation disks (which you may not still have)

it will totally format the hard drive. yes your hard drive contains the programs. your hard drive was made into partitions. in the first (c;) partition operating system and other programs are installed. wipedrive will wipe out your total hard drive. but you can select which partition(s) you can wipe.