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Scully
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11 minutes ago, Scully said:

Watching the news regarding people donating and lending laptops to families who can’t afford one for their kids, and realised we have one sat here doing nothing. 
How do we wipe it clean so we can give it to someone? 

I think you can reset to factory settings, which 'should' wipe everything off, apart from the original program/s installed.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5SqHJMTKZx5sYhlltXJvB1Q/give-a-laptop

From that page, looks like the best option might be:

https://www.business2schools.com/donate

I'm sure if you can find a local school and contact them they would advise on procedure.

What operating system is installed on the laptop?  It depends if they want the machine to be up and running with the operating system installed, or a completely blank canvas onto which they can install what they need.  If the latter, the old fashioned way you would do it would be to reboot and go into DOS mode, then enter the command format/s which would completely reformat the hard drive.  Things have probably moved on a bit since then though.  If you've got the original Windows disc, or a "recovery" disc, there might be an option from that to restore it back to factory settings.  You might even be able to do it from within Windows itself but I'd guess the "reset" may be a partial one so you'd still need to go through it and delete some stuff.

Maybe a call to a local computer shop might help, my knowledge is a bit out of date now I think!

Edited by Jim Neal
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1 hour ago, Scully said:

Watching the news regarding people donating and lending laptops to families who can’t afford one for their kids, and realised we have one sat here doing nothing. 
How do we wipe it clean so we can give it to someone? 

The only true way is to take a hammer to it I'm afraid but having said that it depends on how sensitive the info it may hold; I wouldn't do it TBH

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24 minutes ago, Shearwater said:

The only true way is to take a hammer to it I'm afraid but having said that it depends on how sensitive the info it may hold; I wouldn't do it TBH

Incorrect.

Smashing up a perfectly usable laptop because you wish to securely erase the contents of the hard drive is just wanton destruction borne out of ignorance.

 

1 hour ago, Jim Neal said:

If the latter, the old fashioned way you would do it would be to reboot and go into DOS mode, then enter the command format/s which would completely reformat the hard drive.  Things have probably moved on a bit since then though.

Indeed they have, don't do this!  The hard drive may well contain a hidden recovery partition, which would allow you to 'wipe' the system and it restore it to fresh out of the box status.  Booting into the command line and just spraying away with the format command could render this partition unusable.

Note, the restore utility in the recovery partition is unlikely to securely erase the hard disk, but would be unlikely be recoverable by an amateur, especially by the time a few applications have been installed.

If you're paranoid, google bootable secure erase utilities, use that, and perform a clean install of Windows with USB stick.  Although the format command does have basic secure erase functionality built-in these days, even Windows is reluctant to commit suicide.  So, it's usually quicker to use a bootable USB drive utiilty, or physically remove the hard drive from the laptop and format it with the aid of another computer.

 

 

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I wouldn't ever donate a laptop or computer unless I swapped out the hard drive. 

We do banking and business stuff on it,  too easy with a program to restore or recover data.  

I have used software in the past that overwrites the disc so many times but even those are not infallible.

As other gas said destroy the hard drive if you have personnel info on it.

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1 hour ago, udderlyoffroad said:

Incorrect.

Smashing up a perfectly usable laptop because you wish to securely erase the contents of the hard drive is just wanton destruction borne out of ignorance.

 

Indeed they have, don't do this!  The hard drive may well contain a hidden recovery partition, which would allow you to 'wipe' the system and it restore it to fresh out of the box status.  Booting into the command line and just spraying away with the format command could render this partition unusable.

Note, the restore utility in the recovery partition is unlikely to securely erase the hard disk, but would be unlikely be recoverable by an amateur, especially by the time a few applications have been installed.

If you're paranoid, google bootable secure erase utilities, use that, and perform a clean install of Windows with USB stick.  Although the format command does have basic secure erase functionality built-in these days, even Windows is reluctant to commit suicide.  So, it's usually quicker to use a bootable USB drive utiilty, or physically remove the hard drive from the laptop and format it with the aid of another computer.

 

 

I would disagree, because I've seen data recovered from wiped hard drives and I did add the caveat of it depends on how sensitive the info it may hold " because I fully expected someone to say I was wrong. It makes no difference to me either way; I was simply giving my humble opinion

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Thanks all. Will have a gander on the BBC website.
It didn’t actually have any of our details on it as it was given to us, and was a trial product for a school. 
I just wanted to give it away with a blank hard-drive, that was all, so the new owner could start with a blank canvas as it were. 
Thanks again for the input. 

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I'd imagine the way to go, once the intended recipient is contacted, is to ask them what protocols they follow when receiving second hand computers in order to stay on the right side of data security.  If they scratch their heads and can't come up with a lucid response the answer would be to proceed with caution or not at all.  I'm sure this must be the no.1 question on the lips of potential donors so you'd presume they've got this angle covered!

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If there is anything on it that could land you in jail then trust nothing but a hammer to the disk.

Beyond that a restore and erase will do just fine.  Yes you can use all sorts of tools to recover files, but quite frankly the likelihood of that is slim in the extreme for someone to extract a file from a random machine and then use the data for some sort of malevolent purpose.

There are so much more reliable ways to scam people out of cash than spending an age trawling recovered binary files from old laptops.

Edited by grrclark
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7 hours ago, Scully said:

Watching the news regarding people donating and lending laptops to families who can’t afford one for their kids, and realised we have one sat here doing nothing. 
How do we wipe it clean so we can give it to someone? 

If on windows 10 search for 'reset this pc'

Windows7 search for sysprep.Exe

5 hours ago, Shearwater said:

The only true way is to take a hammer to it I'm afraid but having said that it depends on how sensitive the info it may hold; I wouldn't do it TBH

Do that to a hard drive fine, but not the whole usable unit. Destroy the disk and put fresh in, sorted 

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