redmercuryvendor

you can do a DOD (stands for the Department of Defense's standards) wipe. There are tons of utilities that do this. It overwrites the data on your drive with various patterns of 1s and 0s.

To be pedantic, the DoD developed tool is the ATA SECURE ERASE command, is built into every drive made in about the last decade, and just writes 0 to the entire drive (including sectors in the G-list). The 'overwrite with 1s and 0s multiple times' myth is not only time-wasting overkill for drives with GMR heads (again, past decade), but there's the minuscule chance you had some sensitive data in sectors that were added to the G-list after write, which would be missed by something like DBAN.

freeze from the heat leaking out

This is a persistent misbelief. Space is 'cold' in the sense that the background radiation temperature is pretty low (~3 K), but space, being a vacuum, is very insulating. Almost every thermal problem you will encounter in space is either to do with internal overheating, or thermal stress. Humans generate a lot of heat, so spacesuits have far more of an issue with overheating than being too cold.

My grandfather was a travelling salesman (of industrial machinery), and would often interact with Soviet companies for export. He has a story about a time a pair of Soviet businessmen (or whatever the functionally equivalent communist term would be) travelled to the UK to see an existing setup. They were staying at a hotel, and at breakfast, were offered a cup of tea. They had supposedly never seen a teabag before, so were bemused as to what to do with it. My grandfather, seeing their plight, poured himself a cup of hot water, placed the teabag in his mouth (with the string hanging out the corner) and sipped. The Soviets did likewise.

My question is: were teabags really unknown in the Soviet Union?

Just a word of warning; Chrichton does a lot of research, but that doesn't always result in scientific accuracy in his novels. Prey in particular is rather bad with this.

Is the lack of drag on your limbs in a vacuum noticeable compared to in an atmosphere, or does the restriction of movement in the suit make it impossible to tell?