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Question

Permanently wiping date off notebook

Oct 1, 2018 4:40AM PDT

I'm upgrading my notebook so I plan to sell my old one. How would I permanently wipe the system so nothing can be recovered such as work information, passwords, pictures etc. It's running on Windows 7

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: wiping
Oct 1, 2018 4:47AM PDT

If you wipe everything, you have nothing left, not even Windows. That's only a good idea if you have recovery discs or can boot from a recovery partition. If you don't have those, it means a partial wipe, and that's quite something else. So please tell more about the situation.

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Wiping
Oct 1, 2018 4:51AM PDT

I bought the notebook brand new so I'm guessing one of the disks that came with it would be the one for Windows. I plan to back up everything I need on the system on a disk then wipe it before selling

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Re: disc
Oct 1, 2018 5:14AM PDT

Better check that disc first.

And an obvious disadvantage of using that is that you get an old version of Windows 7 and have to spend quite a lot of time to run each and every Windows update again. Even if you start with the convenience roll-up from https://support.microsoft.com/help/3125574/convenience-rollup-update-for-windows-7-sp1-and-windows-server-2008-r2

What I would do in stead:
1. Login into all users (one by one) and delete all files in their Recycle Bin
2. In Control Panel, make a new Windows user as administrator.
3. Login into that user
4. Also in Control Panel, uninstall all programs you don't want the seller of your laptop to use. Delete their folders in Program Data (if any) also.
5. Delete all other user accounts, including data.
6. Delete all folders in the root folder that you made yourself to store data in. Many people make such folders for some purposes.
7. Delete all files in your own recycle bin.
8. Delete some settings, such as your WiFi login data (SSID + password)
8. Run some program that wipes all free space on your hard disk, for example ccleaner from Pirisoft. Then the data of all files you deleted is totally wiped and inaccessible.

This leaves a laptop with a current version of Windows, all necessary drivers, additional programs that you didn't uninstall (such as cleaner, a free antivirus, libreoffice etc) and only the new administrator user that has no data at all. That's good to sell.