How to make laptop data secure when selling?

kuepper

have an old laptop I could sell or trade-in or give away but wary of doing this because of all the personal data that could be recovered and used. Is there an easy way of making sure everything personal can't be recovered?

HereToday

Taking the hard drive out or secure wiping the drive and reinstalling the OS and applications.

Deru

If you don't want to take the HDD out, you can make a bootable disc with Kill Disk on it.

http://killdisk.com/bootablecd.htm

Go through the erase process and when done, reinstall Windows.

closed

factory restore it using restore parition, then wipe free space with ccleaner.

googler

Take the hard drive out and keep it, selling the rest of the laptop without the drive.

Someone, somewhere WILL buy the laptop and put a fresh drive in it.

closed

for far less than it's worth though, no drive, no os reduces the value significantly.

kuepper

HereToday wrote: »

Taking the hard drive out or secure wiping the drive and reinstalling the OS and applications.

factory restore it using restore parition, then wipe free space with ccleaner.

Thanks for your posts. As I'd need to keep the hard drive to trade-in or sell, are the alternatives you mention in the above posts the same thing and how would I do it/them? Sorry but i'm not techie at all

closed

backup your data first

depends on make or model, see the end of the speedup sticky thread on how to factory restore, or look in the manual

after factory restore, install ccleaner, and tick the wipe free space option at the bottom

http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

kuepper

closed wrote: »

backup your data first

depends on make or model, see the end of the speedup sticky thread on how to factory restore, or look in the manual

after factory restore, install ccleaner, and tick the wipe free space option at the bottom

http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

many thanks

NiftyDigits

kuepper wrote: »

many thanks

Use this direct link for CCleaner if you wish to go down that route.

Indeed, unless you are super-paranoid or work within GCHQ, it is entirely adequate.

The hard drive is an internal component which contains all of your stored data. If you remove it, you remove your stored data.
But as closed suggests, if you remove it, you lower the value of the laptop.

You can remove the hard drive and place it into an external caddy(very simple) costing less than £5, resulting in a new external hard drive for less than a fiver.

What brand name and model number the laptop?