You can reformat your hard drive and restore factory-installed software by clicking Yes, then selecting the check box. The login screen has options for changing your network settings, accessing Windows accessibility options, and turning off your PC in the bottom-right corner. Press the Restart option under your power menu after holding down the Shift key on your keyboard to begin the PC reset process. Press Esc to cancel. Table of contents 1. How do I erase everything on my computer Windows Vista?
Start the PC again after it has been rebooted. You will need to enter the administrator password and language settings if necessary.
You can access the Power button in the lower right corner of the screen from the login screen. You will be taken to the troubleshooting option screen after the computer restarts. Your computer now has the option to be reset or refreshed. Next, click the Next button. The computer should now be started. I have used Revo Uninstaller for years, and love it. It is the only program I have used that finds Registry entries, and safely deletes them along with the program you no longer want.
The only issue I have right now with Revo is that it still seems to have issues in Windows You know you installed a program, but it is not showing up in Revo. I recently used Reset to clean a laptop that had become clogged with programs. I had inquired to several sites, about the windows 10 clean install. Suppressing all accounts excepe for the administrator account is good, but could not be enough. The option to preserve or not is offered each time you delete any account.
As the administrator account may content some personal information, an additional step may be needed : After deleting all regular accounts, create a brand new administrator account. Log into that new account and suppress the original administrator account. Defragement and wipe the free space clean. I would delete everything except the windows folder.
In the year , when I left the job I had under less than amiable circumstances, I deleted everything from the one hard drive, data and programs, except mspaint. I then filled the entire drive with large. The only thing that could have remained was raw data of innocuous content, along with the file headers.
I was not concerned with such residues as those. I never heard anything about the computer after that. Does anybody have reason to believe that technique does not work? You may have gotten most of it wiped, but as the article states, there are a few places which you might have missed where residual data might have remained, for example the swap files and some files in App Data etc.
Why does this site keep mentioning a windows install disk? I have given the usual speeches, but eventually gave up. Nobody wants to bother. I never told them it takes hours, they do not care. Two computers are macs, so I know nothing about them. When that day comes, I may rub it in or not.
If you are using Windows 7 or later, you can download the appropriate installation disc image for Windows the version corresponding to your current OS for free from Microsoft and burn it to a DVD or create a bootable installation USB flash drive. It should register automatically if you have an eligible version installed. Searching Ask Leo!
It takes about 30 seconds, has no cost, and I know that all the data is unrecoverable. All the platters are crushed. A low-tech solution is sometimes the best. Usually you got to press a couple of keys while booting up your system. Sometimes you can do a reset from within Windows. Then just remove my data and program drive If i wanted to remove all the data and programs I could format that drive then fill it with movies and then format it again or just leave it full of movies.
I tend not to sell or give away machines anyway. I think i still have my win3. Good article and bang on the button. It takes approx… one hour to format a hard drive and install any version of windows. This is just what I needed. I upgraded to a new PC and sold my old one. I downloaded and ran DBAN. My only minor complaint was that it took 15 hours to finish wiping a 1. The person who bought the computer had to wait until the next day to pick it up. Thank you, Leo!
I have OEM Windows 10 fully updated. Could I just pick up on the suggestion made to use the Reset option within Windows 10? Microsoft recommend this if the clear all option is the selected all files and non original software plus all accounts are removed and one administration account is established if passing on or selling.
Is there still any concern about private data still residing somewhere which would need further action after the reset? Thanks Jonathan. A deleted file recovery utility would be able to recover the deleted files. Running a free space wiping utility like the one in CCleaner would help with that and it would be secure against normal attempts to recover the data.
Forensic recovery methods might be able to recover some of the data. This article explains how. How should I erase my hard drive before I give it away? Leo, would using a demagnetizer do the trick? Having read all this, I am glad that we have kept all of our old computers we even still have our Apple IIe. It may be time to open a museum. When I gave my brother my old computer, I created a new user account and deleted the other account.
That way most, if not all of the user-created data is deleted and recovering any traces would require some serious computer skills and he has trouble with the basics. Unfortunately, those no longer exist.
I should have run a free-space wipe after that. If I keep the device I can install a new OS on the drive. IF I am donating the machine to a local used computer store, I take the drive out, take it to my drill press and drill through the drive and donate the machine. No one can retrieve data from that hard drive. No need to destroy a perfectly good disk drive.
DBAN is just as secure and you get to reuse the hard drive. Yes, a single pass is sufficient to wipe an SSD. And more writes will shorten the life of the drive.
And of course, this also means it could be downloaded and installed on your Windows Vista computer within a few seconds. Furthermore, on this article, you'll also learn how to wipe all data on Windows Vista using AweEraser. Note: Please make sure you backup all the important data you don't want to lose. Remember, once the files are erased, it'll be impossible for you to recover your data.
This mode allows you to selectively wipe files or folders from Windows Vista hard drive or external storage media device.
Just add the files and click on "Erase" button. This mode can help you wipe an entire hard drive on Windows Vista. It will permanently wipe all data on the selected hard drive. How to prevent deleted file recovery on Windows Vista?
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