Airlane1979
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2018
- Messages
- 5
- Thread Author
- #1
I bought an old HP Presario running Win 7 last year from a local used-computer shop. Now I want to either sell it or give it away on Freecycle. Naturally, I need to wipe all personal data beforehand. The laptop came with Win 7 installed but no discs or anything to use to reinstall it. How can I wipe my data without losing Win 7?
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2015
- Messages
- 8,986
Well the preferred method would be to use a tool like DBAN to scrub the drive and then re-install Windows back on the system. Since you don't have a disc I would recommend the following
- Remove any paid for applications
- (Optionally) remove other programs
- Create a new user account (could just call it User1) and make it an administrator
- Log in with User1
- Start > Run type netplwiz.exe
- Remove your main account (does a better cleanup job)
- Download ccleaner and run that and cleanup temp files etc
- Download SDelete - Windows Sysinternals
- Open an elevated command prompt and change directory to where you have sdelete and run sdelete.exe -z -c C:\ this should walk the C: drive and scramble all of the free space which should now include your old user profile data