Exchanged Sony Vaio SR

Hi, today I exchanged my sony vaio 210d for a 290sr 4gb/2.4p8600/ati 3470HD and for the exact same price I paid for the sony vaio 210. So I heard i will be expecting about 3.5hr of battery life from that video card, is that true?

Secondly, when I returned it a lot of information was still saved on the HD. Do you think Sony employees will go through my files? Eg. saved passwords, emailpasswords, etc. And I opened some files from USB flash drive (but not saved onto the HD) will sony employees be able to recover those? The Flashdrive include some pictures of my family, my CV, some other receipts (including credit card information) which I obviously don't want the Sony Employees to see, so will they be able to retrieve the flashdrive files somehow?--> THe files has not been saved on the HD, they were all saved to my USB flash drive for conveniance, but they were opened with my laptop.

 

That depends on your luck. You should at the very least format your HDD, though that will not stop a determined identity thief, it will at least prevent idle curiosity of an employee going through stuff they shouldn't. As for the files opened in your flash drive, Windows has something called a swap/paging file, where it will occasionally use it to store parts of programs and data files that can't fit onto memory. Contents of your files may also be written to memory dump files. It's unlikely that an employee would try to access it unless they were actively trying to steal your information *and* have the know-how to access these files *and* your info just still happens to be in those files, so I think your flash drive contents are 98% safe.

Not the smartest move to leave your HDD contents, though. Let's just hope that Sony wipes the hard drive before reselling it. The techs may be too busy to do anything more than a format before reselling, but if it gets sold to another user, they'll have plenty of time to go through your data. Hope you at least password-protected your files!

 

Yes, I always get at least 3.5hours of battery life