How to securely wipe a drive before selling your laptop
So, choosing a perfect laptop can take a good amount of consideration. For example, you might have some deal breakers concerning where you want to use your computer and what you want it to run.
HP 15.6-Inch laptop PC: $640 (24% off)
The system will now take a few minutes to erase your drive and show you a progress bar. It took me two minutes to erase a 1TB SATA SSD. Hit Enter to select Default settings when prompted for a boot method. However, the utility starts at $15 and does not have a free trial period. Parted Magic is the best universal secure erase utility around.
Gifting a used MacBook
Read more about Sell my laptop near me here. A cloud service.Using Dropbox or Google Drive is probably the easiest way to backup. Simply select everything you need to save (games, media, work files, etc.) and upload it to the cloud. Linda has been working as an editor at MiniTool for 5 years.
Before you wipe your laptop’s storage, sign out of any accounts and deregister software licenses . If you need those product keys to re-register software on a new laptop, be sure to save that information.
Whether you prefer to do your work on a laptop or a desktop computer, you’re likely need to get yourself some additional storage space. With computing moving to an increasingly mobile workflow, the best cloud storage services have made it easier for computer makers to include less storage space in our laptops and PCs. This is where the SanDisk portable SSD can provide a lot of value. DriveSavers is a leading data recovery service that uses its own set of proprietary tools to get deleted data off of clients’ SSDs and hard drives. This 3.92 pound laptop could be a good workhorse for travel or everyday computing.
The computer is powered using Apple’s M2 processor. The display offers 2,560 x 1,600 pixel native resolution at 227 pixels-per-inch. Even without a sale, a savvy shopper can find a decent Windows-based laptop computer for less than $1,500 or a basic MacBook starting at around $1,000. But when these portable computers go on sale, you’re able to score a faster, more powerful, faster computer for much less. On the Choose an option page, click either “Keep my files” or “Remove everything” depending on which you prefer. If you’re getting rid of the computer, choose to remove everything. If neither of these options sounds good, you can physically destroy the drive before recycling it.
The factory reset will remove all your data, so the next user doesn’t have access to it, which is vital for your privacy and security. When the process finishes, Windows 11 will reinstall and your PC will start from the setup screen. You will have to pick some preferences and then log in with your Microsoft account . Once that’s done, you’ll be back on the desktop and ready to use your PC again.
How you wipe your computer depends on what you plan to do with it afterward. If you are keeping it, you can simply reset its hard drive and install a fresh copy of Windows, macOS, or ChromeOS. Here’s some quick links to manufacturers’ software you can try. We haven’t tested to see if all of these have secure erase features that work with all of their drives. Yet, more and more sellers resort to buyback sites like ours,Gadget Salvation, because the service is free, and you get paid much faster.