MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
I've never owned or used a PC, I've looked in the general direction of people who are sitting next to PCs occasionally- thats the sum depth of my knowledge of them.
I'm in the process of disposing of a few of my late dads belongings, in particular a fairly new Acer Aspire One notebook. He hardly made any use of it as he'd always used Macs too, he just bought it as an extra machine for web browsing away from home.
I want to delete any user data before its sold but keep the system and pre-installed software intact. From what I can tell theres very little of it, user accounts and browsing related data, there are no documents, pics, music or anything else to suggest off-line activity that I can see.
So far I've managed to switch it on, recoil at ugliness and clumsiness of it all. Sweat a bit. Resist the urge to switch it off again immediately. Frankly its an alien world, but not the sexy aliens that Captain Kirk would meet.
So who can talk me though deleting accounts and data in the fewest steps, bearing in mind that I'm an idiot. The OS is Win 7 Starter
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Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup
Make sure everything is ticked and click ok. This will clean up temp internet files etc.
Start > Control Panel > Network and Internet > Delete Browsing History and Cookies
Again make sure everything is ticked (apart from preserve passwords) and click ok. This will clean up browsing history etc (assuming Internet Explorer was used as the browser)
BTW: Start is the little round windows icon bottom left incase you weren't sure
Hope this helps
It will probably have a recovery partition so you can restore it to factory settings when it was first purchased. You usually access this by bashing one of the F keys when you start the laptop up, which one I don't know. OR there may be a program if you look in all programs, some sort of Acer recovery program to reset the machine.
EDIT it might be Alt and F10
As per Skids - Acer will have some software on your Pc - accessible from the Start Menu which will allow you to reset everything back to factory fresh. Run the app, follow the prompts ( it's so simple even a Mac user can do it).
You usually access this by bashing one of the F keys when you start the laptop up, which one I don't know
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( it's so simple even a Mac user can do it).
I'm so sure I can disappoint you
Cheers for the advice all
Check to see if there's an option to return it to factory defaults - this should flatten it and reinstall the original OS.
Sorry for your loss.