COMPLETELY CLEANING OUT A LAPTOP

bowtieman55

bowtieman55

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jan 25, 2006
Location
Edenton, NC
My mom has a 4 year old Inspirion 1000 she's gonna get rid of. She wants to completely clean out the hard drive and everything; to put it back to factory specs. Can she do this herself or does it need to be taken to a computer specialist?

TIA:beer:
 
it doesnt cost much to have someone else do it. as long as you have the reload/recovery disks you can do it yourself, if not you may not have all the drivers to reload for the fresh setup.
 
If there is critical information on the HDD I'd would consider destroying the hard drive. Data can be recovered from a reformatted HDD. The larger the hard drive the better chance this can be done. I'm the tech guy for an ISP and I occasionally get computers from from folks who have reformatted their systems and forgot to back up some important files.

It's rather expensive for the software and tech fee to do this but if someone get's this laptop and has the what's needed the data that was "erased" can be recovered some of the time
 
They make software out there that will go through and over write any data on the drive with just blank data for that exact situation. I would google and see if you can find some free software.
 
I can do it for ya.... for a washer or dryer :fuck-you:

ha ha, nah, but its simple as long as you have a OS disk cause I am all out... and thats piracy anyway. Hit me up.
 
google 'dban' you can burn an iso and boot to it. It will do DOD wipes + other styles..

It has options/# of passes etc. that will cause it to run for months if you let it..
 
bowtieman55 said:
My mom has a 4 year old Inspirion 1000 she's gonna get rid of. She wants to completely clean out the hard drive and everything; to put it back to factory specs. Can she do this herself or does it need to be taken to a computer specialist?
TIA:beer:
Click to expand...

killdisk - it's free and will do the job.
 
In the BIOS set up, Chanrge the boot order so that it will boot from the CDROM drive.
Put in the Windows XP disk that came with it.
Turn on the laptop. Select reinstall windows and then, when prompted, select "format drive" not quick format. This will reformat the hard drive, wiping it clean in the process.
Go through the windows install.
Once the windows install is complete, she will have to reinstall the drivers. This will be on a seperate disk labeled "applications and drivers." This will reinstall the video, audio, LAN and wirelss lan card drivers. This part is manual, done one at a time. A bit tedious.
I just went through the whole thing with my wife's dell. She got bit by a virus that got past the anti-virus software. This virus blocked all internet access to Anti-virus websites so I could not get the update and get rid of it.

If your mother is even a little computer savvy, she can handle it. Not difficult. Just a bit tedious.
 
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