I have a Dell laptop that is a little over a year old. Last week, the diagnostics said that my hard disc was failing. Dell is going to replace the hard disc under warranty. Its Win 8.1.

I have already bought an external drive and backed up the entire system. What else do I need to do?

For example, where are the passwords kept that Windows remembers for me?

get a screw driver and replace it yourself.

I would/could, but there are also a bunch of dead pixels on the screen and they’re going to replace the screen as well.

fair enough. tbh if you are happy with the way the system is you are probably better ghosting(cloning) the harddrive and restoring it in its entirity when you get it back. I’d imagine they’ll just do a factory install of a new HD.

Clear your data. Wipe it and reinstall Windows from the recovery partition. Else you may be giving someone your data.

Or be very careful about how you delete stuff! Especially internet history with the donkey pr0n!

If you want to make sure all of your data is wiped, then get DBAN. http://www.dban.org/
You can boot that from a USB stick, and it will securely overwrite everything.

I guess that I’m not super concerned about Dell stealing my info. I’m guessing that they handle so many repairs that and that I’m such a small fish that there’s no point in bothering with me. 😐

I’m more concerned that I’ll still have everything when I restore from the backup…

Those passwords are probably in your browser. Is it Chrome?

Main browser is Firefox.

Transfer Wizard might be what you need here, or whatever it calls itself in Windows 8. Hang on.

“Windows Easy Transfer”

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/transfer-files-settings-from-another-computer

Backs up your profile to external storage. Restore from it when you get your new machine.

And insert obligatory “take backups anyway” comment here. Any drive can die catastrophically without warning, and backup storage and recovery is considerably cheaper and simpler than data recovery.