Clearing laptop content

baser999

Mums just gone into a nursing home and we’re starting to clear her flat. She has a Lenovo laptop and we’re wondering what’s the easiest way for us to clear off any stuff that’s on it? Not sure there’s anything she’ll really need. Advice as simplistic as possible please.
Thank you

Neil_Jones

baser999 said:

Mums just gone into a nursing home and we’re starting to clear her flat. She has a Lenovo laptop and we’re wondering what’s the easiest way for us to clear off any stuff that’s on it? Not sure there’s anything she’ll really need. Advice as simplistic as possible please.
Thank you

If you want to ensure nothing can be retrieved you'd do better to take the hard drive out.

Are you sure your mum wouldn't want the laptop in the home as a sign of something familiar?

victor2

I've used DBAN in the past to completely wipe a hard drive. It was in a computer somebody gave to me that I could make use of. He trusted me to wipe it, but I felt better showing him the result of the DBAN process - which I just let run overnight on a 2TB drive.

baser999

Neil_Jones said:

baser999 said:

Mums just gone into a nursing home and we’re starting to clear her flat. She has a Lenovo laptop and we’re wondering what’s the easiest way for us to clear off any stuff that’s on it? Not sure there’s anything she’ll really need. Advice as simplistic as possible please.
Thank you

If you want to ensure nothing can be retrieved you'd do better to take the hard drive out.

Are you sure your mum wouldn't want the laptop in the home as a sign of something familiar?

Sadly she can barely see nowadays and hasn’t in fact used the laptop for a long while. It was only ever used by family when ordering her shopping etc but  invariably never charged up so we ended up using our mobiles.

baser999

@victor2  this may be the way to go, will check it out 

Adamhoward20

It depends what you intend to do with it. If it is going to stay with friends and family, it’s probably easiest to just delete the user profile and create a new empty one. I doubt anyone close to you is going to use deleted file recovery programs to find your files.

if you are selling it to someone you don’t know, you may want to consider using a forensic erasing program. However, I wouldn’t completely format the drive otherwise you’ll need to reinstall windows and other required programs.

PixelPound

baser999 said:

@victor2  this may be the way to go, will check it out 

DBAN hasn't been updated for several years. There is ABAN which is freeware and open source.

baser999

Adamhoward20 said:

It depends what you intend to do with it. If it is going to stay with friends and family, it’s probably easiest to just delete the user profile and create a new empty one. I doubt anyone close to you is going to use deleted file recovery programs to find your files.

if you are selling it to someone you don’t know, you may want to consider using a forensic erasing program. However, I wouldn’t completely format the drive otherwise you’ll need to reinstall windows and other required programs.

Not sure we’d keep the laptop, just interested in clearing her info initially 

Cisco001

Is it an old laptop?
If yes, check if it has SSD. If it is with HDD, I suggest you swap with SSD and install OS. I personally don't bother wiping old HDD.

km1500

delete everything you want to from the drive

then run eraser to overwrite the drive free space with zeros

https://eraser.heidi.ie/

unforeseen

Just re-install windows. 
The chances of somebody wanting to go to the effort of trying to recover data from an old personal laptop range from very slim to not a hope in hell. 
There's no incentive for anybody to spend any time trying to do it.