Best way to dispose of old laptops - recycle or sell ?

closed

Removing hard drive, reduces the resale value significantly, as will dban if you have no windows to put back on.

thenudeone

There are plenty of utilities which will wipe the contents of a hard drive securely, and others which will wipe all personal information and overwrite all empty areas of the disk to prevent data recovery, whilst leaving the Windows installation intact.

eg: http://www.east-tec.com/eraser/download/ available with a free fully functioning trial (presumably for a limited period but long enough to do one laptop!)

ebay is a great outlet once that's done, as long as they're not too old.

Removing the hard drive will make the machine much less valuable second hand, as someone will have to source a new drive, caddy, and operating system CD/DVD to get the laptop working again.

buglawton

closed wrote: »

Delete your data/account
factory restore them
install ccleaner, tick wipe free space box and run it
Sell, you'll get more for them with windows and an intact restore partition.

if you want confirmation no data is recoverable, run recuva in deep scan mode.

Exactly what I did to sell an old netbook - it needed a system restore so maybe leaves old retrievable data on the drive. Wonder how secure Ccleaner's wipe method is though.