Selling laptop, need some advice ...

[dud]

I may be selling my laptop soon and need some advice - especially from others who have sold theirs. Before you sold did you reformat your hard drive and then re-load an operating system? My laptop has a set of "restore" disks that load XP, along with a host of proprietary (bloated) software. A number of features on the unit will not work without this software. I plan to reformat and reload the entire software load from the restore disks before selling it. What would you do? Thanks for any advice!

 

[Confused]

I'd take anything I needed off it, chuck in the Restore disks and let it do it.

Don't go through the "setting up" stage, when it gets to that bit (please enter your name/computer name etc) just switch it off and pack it up.


Confused

 

[RagingBITCH]

^ What the former Elite member said It's better to give them a clean slate than have to deal with all your stuff.

 

[bleeb]

I agree that you should always give the "chump" who's buying your hardware a clean slate. Completely reformatting can be a hassle, and time-consuming so I suggest using the restore discs.

 

[HomeBrewerDude]

i formatted and re-installed.

 

[aphex]

Same here, formatted and reinstalled.

 

[Joker81]

Use this. http://dban.sourceforge.net/
It will totally format the drive using different methods. it can do DoD format (7 times 0,1,random)

This is to protect your information thats on the drive.

 

[RossMAN]

There's a good chance regardless of what you do they will reformat and re-install when they receive it.

That's what I would do.

 

[dud]

Thank you all for your replies. It has just confirmed what I had already planned to do. Thanks again!

 

[SKC]

Joker, thanks for the link to dban; I was looking for something like this :beer:

 

[MikePanic]

id do a fresh re-install w/ the recovery disks that came w/ it... thats your best bet