Ok, so I sold my laptop. Can anyone help me with a way to delete all my personal information without having to reinstall the OS? The laptop doesn't have a disk drive and I simply don't have the time to go through that process. I'm not super concerned about anything important being on this machine when I sell it, but I want to do more than simply dragging my files to the trash bin.
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Sold my laptop. Need to safely delete my info without Reinstalling the OS.
- Thread starter Itchyeyes
- Start date
Go into the Control Panel, create a new profile (with Admin privileges). Log into that account, go back to the Control Panel and delete the old account - when asked if you want to keep the old files, say No and delete them all. The object here is deleting your old account and files here and then emptying the Recycle Bin also - that leaves "free space" where the files used to be, which is what CCleaner looks for. Technically the data is still sitting there for data recovery, but CCleaner will now come back and do a "secure wipe" by finding the areas where data was - that's now marked as free - and wiping over it with random data depending on the number of passes.
CCleaner is the recommended method for this because it only wipes free space or space marked as free by the OS - it won't wipe out your entire OS as some more serious erasing tools can do if you're not careful. CCleaner simply doesn't have that much "power."
At that point the actual account and related data are gone but technically someone could still do data recovery on the drive and recover info, etc. So here's how you follow up:
Go get CCleaner and install it. Once installed, go to the Options and alter the settings so that it wil do a "Simple Overwrite (1 pass)" and select the particular drive you have Windows installed on - if it's just one then that makes it even easier. Also make sure that "Wipe MFT Free Space" is checked as well.
Now, click the Cleaner button on the left, unselect all the sections as noted in the image below and follow the instructions in red, you're pretty much done.
If you want "more secure" then do the 3 pass wipe but, honestly, I'm sure the 1 pass will do just fine.