selling old laptop, what steps do i need to take to uninstall everything?

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glennl

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i'm planning on selling an old Portege 3110 CT that i never use. do i need to do anything beyond uninstalling windows xp to make sure whoever buys it can't access any personal files, etc.? do i need to format the HD? any suggestions appreciated, i'm a total novice in this area.
 
Format. Format. Format. Format. There are some REALLY good drive wiping tools out there. Find one and use it. More than once.
 
Yes if you have another computer put it in there and format it. It just cleans it clean. What you got to do is you need to shutdown your computer that you use, put the hd in your computer but make it as your slave, turn on the computer, when the computer starts up to your desktop right click on mycomputer go to manage, you will see the manage part and on the right side part double click on "storage", then double click on disk management, on the bottom of the page there you will see the hard drives with a blue bar on top of the hd, right click on the one you want to format and click on delete partition, after it is doing that format it and it will be clean of everything. I did it with a hd that had a virus and it cleaned the virus also.
 
cichlidkeeper91 said:
I did it with a hd that had a virus and it cleaned the virus also.

Of course it did. when you format a hdd, it erases everything on the hdd, and the virus was on the hdd wasn't it, so there you go. Anyway, formatting sometimes can still leave behind little bits and pieces of personal info that an expert can retrieve. There are programs out there that will format a hdd and then write a bunch of random numbers to it, the reformat it again. This ensures that everything gets wiped out. I think the FBI/CIA repeat this process something like 17 times before they deem their computers data free when they are selling them to the general public.

hdd stands for hard drive just in case you didn't know.
 
cichlidkeeper91 said:
Yes if you have another computer put it in there and format it. It just cleans it clean. What you got to do is you need to shutdown your computer that you use, put the hd in your computer but make it as your slave, turn on the computer, when the computer starts up to your desktop right click on mycomputer go to manage, you will see the manage part and on the right side part double click on "storage", then double click on disk management, on the bottom of the page there you will see the hard drives with a blue bar on top of the hd, right click on the one you want to format and click on delete partition, after it is doing that format it and it will be clean of everything. I did it with a hd that had a virus and it cleaned the virus also.

are laptop HD's even swappable? arent sizes diffrent? he could just format it..
 
With the right equipment, you can hook up a laptop hard drive to a desktop computer. We do it all the time.
 
formatting the drive will clear any data off but this data will be recoverable.

The best way to ensure un-recoverable erasure is to use a purpose designed software tool. It needs to write random bits to every byte of your hard drive several times in order to ensure the data is completely gone.

there are dozens if not hundreds of tools that can do this, try looking here www.majorgeeks.com
 
kfc469 said:
Of course it did. when you format a hdd, it erases everything on the hdd, and the virus was on the hdd wasn't it, so there you go. Anyway, formatting sometimes can still leave behind little bits and pieces of personal info that an expert can retrieve. There are programs out there that will format a hdd and then write a bunch of random numbers to it, the reformat it again. This ensures that everything gets wiped out. I think the FBI/CIA repeat this process something like 17 times before they deem their computers data free when they are selling them to the general public.

hdd stands for hard drive just in case you didn't know.
Yea I know im not that stupid. What else would it mean?
 
cichlidkeeper91 said:
Yea I know im not that stupid. What else would it mean?

I wasnt talking to just you, I was talking to the guy who started this thread also, because he didnt really know much about the whole process.
 
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