MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
I'm selling a relatively new laptop on Ebay as I have been given a one from work and I'd rather sell mine now than in a years time when it is outdated and relatively worthless.
Anyway, I am in the process of backing up my personal stuff before I clean down the laptop. I also have a few engineering analysis and design programs on which I need to remove for licensing reasons (please note, these are legitimate to me through work, no funny business!), although I do intend to leave on Office pro as it will enhance the sale price. This was purchased at the time of buying the laptop.
Is there anything in particular I need to do to make sure the HDD is reasonably cleaned down and all programs are removed?
I do not wish to do a clean install or at least not like XP used to be if I can't keep Office pro without re setting it up.
Laptop is a DEll XPS i7 running W7 if that matters.
Cheers in advance.
advertise it with all the porn still there, you might actually get more for it
I think Ccleaner, which is free and a pretty useful programme, has a function that wipes empty space. I also believe that doing a disk de-fragmentation also has a similar effect, perhaps someone with a bit more computer nouse than me could explain, (or prove me wrong!!)
Is there anything in particular I need to do to make sure the HDD is reasonably cleaned down and all programs are removed?
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I do not wish to do a clean install or at least not like XP used to be if I can't keep Office pro without re setting it up.
Pick one, they're mutually exclusive. You can uninstall stuff and delete personal data but there's always a chance you've missed something (and always a chance your deleted data could be recovered if someone knows what they're doing). There's ways of reducing the risk but, personally, I wouldn't chance it.
The best way would be to record the Office and XP licence keys (google 'jellybean' if you've lost them), securely erase it, rebuild it with XP, reinstall Office. But of course, that's a bit of work.
The secure, easy way would be to DBAN it and take the hit on the software licenses. I doubt anyone buying a laptop off ebay is going to attach much value to it anyway.
meh did you ever use it for banking or anything sensitive? with out doing a secure wipe of the disk and re install it's pretty trivial to recover.