WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon believes it has found a way to give its old computers away to American schools and still protect information locked in the machines' hard drives. Officials announced Thursday that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was reversing an unpopular five-month-old order to destroy the hard drives on unclassified computers, which rendered the computers practically unusable. Henceforth, hard drives should be destroyed on classified machines but only overwritten on unclassified ones, Wolfowitz said. The overwriting entails printing series of ones and zeros over the stored material. "Wolfowitz's new ... guidance will make more computers available for schools and other worthy organizations," a Pentagon statement said. It said more than 74,000 pieces of computer equipment, valued at $60 million or so, had been donated to school organizations in 2000 before the order came in January to destroy hard drives. Wolfowitz's predecessor Rudy de Leon had order the destruction but said the idea should be reviewed, said Susan Hansen, a Pentagon spokeswoman. "We've looked at the pluses and minuses," she said Thursday, and determined that overwriting would protect information on the computers while allowing the machines to be donated. Some lawmakers had criticized the January order as overkill. Others supported it after an audit found sensitive information such as lists of names and addresses had been left on hard drives of donated computers. Though unclassified, they said such cases still present risks. Wolfowitz's decision returns the practice to what it had been since 1992, requiring destruction only of computers that had dealt with classified information.