Which would be best: clean restore or manual clean-up?

Greetings!

I hope this is the most appropriate forum to post this question.

I have an Acer TM 800 laptop (bought in 2003) running Windows XP. I want to pass it on to another person.

I am wondering what would be the safest and most convenient way of cleaning up the hard disk to remove my data and the software I have added in the course of the last four years. My HD is almost full and has slowed down of late.

My plan is to give the other person the laptop with Windows, Works, Open Office, Outlook, IE, MC, Firefox and Thunderbird, Spybot and AdAware and to defragment the hard disk so that it is as fast as possible.

On the one hand, I could use my Acer restore CD's to do a clean restore. But what about all the Windows and other MS software updates since 2003? Would it not take hours to download them? And what if something went wrong and I lost the OS software?

The other possibility is to manually delete my data and all the superfluous software. That too could take quite some time and perhaps it would be less effective than the previous option?

I have an external HD and have thought about coping my HD to it as a backup in case something went wrong. Can anyone point me to a good "how-to" on this? Am I right in thinking that it is not just a question of coping the contents of the HD, but that the copy must be made in a certain fashion so that the laptop would boot from it?

Thank you very much in advance for taking the time to answer!

Best wishes,

Eamann

 

You have a lot of options and a lot of things you can do.

1. Make sure you backup your data. You probably already know this, but you want to make sure that all of your data you have copied off of it before you do anything else.
   _
2. After the backup, the next thing I would do is remove all of the data from the system, uninstall almost all programs, and just try to clean up as much as possible.
   _
3. After removing everything, an essential step is to wipe the hard disk. Deleting and even formatting does not remove the data from your hard disk; you must use a disk wiping tool to overwrite everything. Download and install the free Eraser program (http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/download.php), and use that to wipe the free (unused) space on the drive. This makes sure that none of your personal data will be accessible by the new owner. You only need to do 2-3 passes for this, and it could take a few hours.
   _
4. After you wipe the drive, then I would do a full restore from the restore discs, then go to windows update to get updates, etc...
   _
5. Then install the remaining software you want to give to them. Make sure you transfer and applicable licenses to the new owner (by not using the same license on your computers). Of course with the free stuff, you don't have to worry about that.

It might seem like a bit of work, but you want to make sure that all of your personal data is no longer on the system, and you want the next person to have the cleanest system possible.

 

Orev,

Why do step 2 if you are going to do step 3 and 4???

Gary

 

If you wipe free space before you delete your data, the data will still be on the drive after you finish the wipe. Then any formatting or recovery install won't wipe that data.

You can also install eraser and use it to wipe the free space after you do the recovery, but then you'll have eraser left on the system. Maybe that's fine, and in that case you can re-arrange the order a little bit.

 

Thank you very much! I'll do as you say.

Eamann