Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Technical Help and How To's Old Laptop Question?

I'm giving my old laptop to my sister (she's gonna have to get it check out though) I've delete my files and cookies and temp. files. Is there anything else I should do before I give it to her?

Ideally, I'd wipe the whole drive and just reinstall a fresh copy of the operating system. Barring that, I'd just make sure all the latest patches are installed.

If you're paranoid that you've missed something in your home folder, you can create a new user and delete your user. That will create a whole new user folder in Documents and Settings and delete your folder. If you do that, don't forget to set the new user account to have machine administrative privileges before you delete your account or your sister won't be able to do much on her new laptop such as installing new apps.

If you're worried about passing on personal identity information on the drive such as finances, passwords, etc, I would recommend finding a wiping utility that will replace all the bytes on the drive with 0s. Be aware that formatting a drive doesn't actually clear the hard drive of the data you left behind, it's essentially the same thing as ripping out the table of contents in a book. You lose a record of what pages go where and are for what, but the pages themselves are still there. If you don't care about that, I would just reformat it and install a fresh copy of Windows with the Windows installation utility.