Every dev knows how to wipe a drive. Buy an identical drive. Throw old drive into the incinerator.

Lack of history is a clue system was wiped or reinstalled from scratch.

Its very difficult to make windows appear to be an old actively used install. Encase (or new software, I havent done forensic for >6 years now) will tell you everything about timestamps and what that means.

I was joking. But honestly, if you don't your secrets to be found, you do have to go for extreme measures.

I didn't know this but I do now.

This is not a valid assumption. Shredding a drive to the extent that data recovery is not possible requires knowledge that, often times, revolves around the architecture of the drive in question (see: wear leveling).

An unrelated, yet illustrative, counter example is the seemingly reasonable, yet false, assumption that RMS performs his own installs of GNU/Linux.

You mean the guy that once used thermite to break into a computer lab to impress boyhood friends? The guy that literally has a warehouse full of rocket fuel?