Help with ebaying laptop please!

Timmne

Hi all,

I've bought a new computer which arrives this week coming. My laptop's a bit too slow these days but is a good spec - an Inspiron 6000 which cost iro £1100 when we bought it.

I've had a look on ebay and these are fetching around £100 in good working order and fair condition which is similar to mine.

Problem is, because I only use my laptop for basic office things and a couple of bits of accountancy software, I have no idea whether various things like the DVD drive and CD writer work and whether I'm able to sell it as used (but working).

Is there any easy way of me being able to prove that things work without having to test them manually (i.e. I have no CDs to write to, to test that the drive writes)? Also, how do I ensure that whomever buys the laptop can't access my data? I have a lot of sensitive client work on there that I can't be passing on to any Tom, !!!!!! or Harry!

Thanks in advance.

Oh - also, is ebay the best route for getting some money back on it?

macman

To know it works you have to test it manually.
DVD drive-put any DVD in and run it.
CD writer-beg, borrow or buy cheapest pack of CD-R's you can and do test burn of some files.
To ensure your data is deleted, do a factory restore. On Dell's this is normally done from a separate partition on the HD, or from a CD provided. The manual will give you full details of how to do this on your model-or go the Dell site for support.
It's not sufficient simply to delete your personal files, as this does not remove them, it simply removes the indexing. The files remain until they are overwritten.
Incidentally, you will probably find that the laptop is running much faster than at present after you do a factory restore.
It would be a good idea however to run Windows Updates once you have done the restore.

Timmne

Brilliant, thanks!

I'll nab a cd from someone I reckon- £100's not a small amount so I ought to make the effort!

fwor

Sound advice on the testing front but, to be pedantic, not on the deletion of private data.

If the laptop has been used for any length of time, data stored on it is likely to have been widely distributed across the HDD. If you format and re-install the OS, much of this will not be overwritten. You might argue that recovering that data won't be easy, but it certainly can be done, and with Ebay you have no way of knowing where it will end up.

The safest course of action here would be to download and run a utility such as DBAN to securely delete the data on the hard drive before re-installing the OS.

Timmne

Thanks- is DBAN pretty self explanatory to use?

fwor

Timmne wrote: »

is DBAN pretty self explanatory to use?

If you're used to downloading an ISO image, writing it to a CD and then booting your laptop from the resulting CD then yes, it is.

If not, the FAQ here will guide you through the steps:

http://www.dban.org/

peter_the_piper

I would also suggest you go to the ebay section and ask about the pitfalls etc of selling a laptop, there's lots of scallywags out there.