Computer help forum: What should I erase before I sell my notebook?

Read http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-7813-0.html?forumID=32&threadID=119247&messageID=1353529 and use the tool there to discover what you've stowed on the hard disk without knowing.

And this is the tip of the iceburg.

As to Office 2003, if you are like most, you'll get more cash by selling that seperately. If you were to leave it on the machine, the person may think you sold it to them and will create headaches when they demand the license transfer. That office alone may be worth hundreds.

-> I suggest a disk wipe and using the restore CDs that came with the machine. Don't install any software that you won't be giving them the CDs and Licenses to.

Bob

I call it a clean-install.
Load up the system software. Nothing left that's personal.

I read the post and also thoughtEVERYTHING!!!
You and Bob beat me to it.
Ditto on everything you both said.

Just one question John. After a clean install, can someone get back any data later?? I suppose anything is possible.

-Kevin

After a clean install, can someone get back any data later??

Depends who the SOMEONE is.

Good....format and reload.

Better...a few passes of a disk wipe routine and then format and reload.

Given enough time/money/fancy equipment just about anything you have every written on that HD can be read.

Do the "better" and all your porn sites are gone.

This is a lot of good advice. I now cring when I think about the several PCs that I have just given away to charities, etc. in the past. I didn't bother to do anything but just erase my data files. Sounds like I have some work to do if I'm going to do this job right this time.

I'd Wipe everything and reformat/reinstall myself. Although, I wouldn't recommend putting WinME on there again. That OS is the most unstable/unfreindly/craptastic OS I've ever seen and I'm old enough to still remember DOS. Do your prospective customers a favor, put Windows 2000/XP on there. Also, sell Office seperately, if you can. Even the Student & Teacher edition will fetch a decent sum. Office is one of the few MS programs that runs well and is therefore worth it's weight in gold.

In common with everybody else, I agree you should delete everything, overwrite it and reformat to be sure it's gone. Partition Magic has an option when deleting a partition to do a secure erase. I would use it to secure erase all the partitions on the drive, then create a new single partition across the whole drive. One caution, if your machine came with a recovery partition, rather than recovery CDs, don't delete that partition. Use the Partition Magic option to format the partition and then use the option on most system reloads to reformat again when you reload from the restore disks that came with the system originally.

As far as Windows Me is concerned, I know most of the world believes it is a bad system but I can honestly say that I used it for 4 years with no problems - but then you will have your own experience from this machine. Mine was a UK system but I can't imagine that makes any difference.

Putting some other operating system on or including Office in the sale raises the issue of software licences. The definitive answer to what you can and can't do with respect to licence transfer is in the Microsioft End User Licence Agreement (EULA). You should have had one when the machine was new or if you filed it in a "safe place!" you can check the MS web site. Be sure you comply with all the conditions.

Remember if you load a different operating system, it is not covered by the Me licence, you need to buy a copy from somewhere and that kind of defeats the object. If you sell and transfer the licence for Office, you can't keep a copy, you are selling it all.

So what I'd do is just reload the software that came with the machine and nothing else and sell the machine with the original restore disks and the MS certificate of Authenticity. If you want to sell other software, make that a separate deal.

Good Luck.

After reading about all I need to do before selling it, and seeing what these are going for on eBay, it may be more trouble than it is worth. I'll just keep this laptop as a backup until it dies a natural death.