What lessons can we take away from my story? They are, in fact, quite simple and obvious: merely deleting files and quick formatting is usually not enough when disposing of or selling hard drives. For more assurance, it’s better to perform a full format (in modern operating systems, of course). And for the truly paranoid, there’s the good old console utility SDelete from the Sysinternals suite or a tool named... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago

I assume you were using a dynamically expanding disk - if so just note it won't dynamically contract just by deleting files. To shrink the drive you will likely need to run sdelete -z on the drive inside the VM to clear the free space, then edit and compact the VHDX. You will need to be able to boot the VM to run sdelete though so you'll need to temporarily move other files off the drive, or move the VM files to... Source: 12 months ago

You can always download sdelete https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete and do an overwrite pass just to be safe. It'll take a while but you can do other things while it's running. Source: about 1 year ago

My understanding is that it doesn't completely solve it. I don't have time to dig up an authoritative source for this claim — hopefully this superuser comment will suffice. I believe that you can achieve something close to a secure erase by filling up your SSD to 100% capacity with data before deleting; the utility sdelete supposedly does this when using the -c option. Source: about 1 year ago

Check out sdelete from the MS sysinternals utilities suite: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete. Source: over 1 year ago

To be sure that our exe is actually looking for the DLL, fire up the SysInternals' Process Monitor. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago

Don't know what PTAT stands for, but whenever I have issues with windows software running properly I pull out Process Monitor to log what that program was doing at the time of the error message. Sometimes there is a clue such as not being able to find a particular file, or registry key, or something else crashing etc. Source: 11 months ago

This might be a bit advanced but if it was me I would probably get frustrated and use SysInternals specifically procmon Https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon. Source: 11 months ago

Used Procmon, Diskmon with a mix of CrystalDiskinfo in my testings to kinda figure out the browsers that did a lot of writing and reading to my old SSD in a ancient laptop I have. You can pretty much get estimates of the ones that use too much Disk resources. Source: 11 months ago

You can use something like Process Monitor (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon) to see what processes are interacting with which registry keys. Source: 12 months ago