Also in Canada, unlike the US, cable companies are required to allow third party resellers. So we can get either cable or DSL internet from smaller players giving us slightly more options.
Before you wipe the drive you could do a whole drive encryption with TrueCrypt or BitLocker and then use DBAN for spinning drives or Secure Erase for SSDs.
Thanks for all the great recommendations I’ve compiled a list of the books mentioned in this post, non-fiction and then fiction by author. Apologies in advance for any I missed.