clear off laptop to sell

maka_2

hiya as the title says im selling my laptop and would like to know the best wy to clear it off apart from programs like windows , excel and so on

timmmers

If you had bank details on it or anything like that...format it and reistal windows is best.

t

maka_2

timmmers wrote: »

If you had bank details on it or anything like that...format it and reistal windows is best.

t

dont have the windows disc??

Donnie

If your selling, best to format and re-install all anyway.

Do you have a COA stuck on the laptop?

-TangleFoot-

timmmers wrote: »

If you had bank details on it or anything like that...format it and reistal windows is best.

If you had anything personal or sensitive on it a format will be nowhere near enough.

Options:

1. Restore factory settings* and clean the free space using Eraser.
2. Use DBAN before reinstalling the operating system from CD/DVD.
3. Destroy the HDD with a cricket bat.

*Method varies from system to system.

pendulum

maka wrote: »

dont have the windows disc??

Do you have a restore or recovery partition? Check manual that came with laptop.

garyjohn80

i'm afraid formatting a disk does nothing really. It leaves all your old information on the disk it just tells the disk not to read the information and to overwrite it as necessary. Some very simple software can recover all this information very quickly.

The only sure way is to physically destroy you hard disk but if you dont have sensitive info on your computer you just want to clear out all you old files the easiest and quickest way is to format and reinstall. There are some programs on the market
that claim to clear out personal data but i dont know how reliable these are. Windows really does hide things all over the place and duplicates many files.

JasX

-TangleFoot- wrote: »

If you had anything personal or sensitive on it a format will be nowhere near enough.

Options:

1. Restore factory settings* and clean the free space using Eraser.
2. Use DBAN before reinstalling the operating system from CD/DVD.
3. Destroy the HDD with a cricket bat.

*Method varies from system to system.

2 and 3 are certainly reliable tho I'd not be happy with 1 unless you used Eraser to wipe the entire disk before doing a complete reinstall.

If you can't reliably wipe as above and reinstall your OS a fresh you're a bit stuck with it keeping your personal data in a fairly easily recoverable form

Oneday77

maka wrote: »

hiya as the title says im selling my laptop and would like to know the best wy to clear it off apart from programs like windows , excel and so on

How old is you laptop, any ideas of the model and specs of it?

Chippychap

I think that removing the HDD before selling is the ONLY safe way.

Donnie

Don't bother with all of that overkill. A format and reinstall will be enough. There must be some quite paranoid people around; thinking that people are trying to harvest old information from bought laptops.

I, for one, simply don't have such 'sensitive' info on my computer and my banking info is not 'stored' on my computer.

If you really do have 'sensitive' material on the HDD, then use DBAN as indicated in TangleFoot's post.

It's seems too many reside in the theoretical world and not the real world.