General Question

Jaybee's avatar

Whats the best way to return a computer to its original condition?

Asked by Jaybee (220points) September 7th, 2007 from iPhone

I have four laptops that I don’t use and would like to give to friends. But I don’t know how to erase all my own stuff from the hard drive. They are all Windows so even when I erase I still can recover everything by ‘restore to an earlier date’ feature. I switched to Mac system 3 years ago and don’t know what to do with these things. In the meantime they are slowly becoming ancient and soon no one one will want to use them.

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3 Answers

klaas4's avatar

In geek language we call it format c colon.
Boot in DOS and type “format c:” and if you have other disks too, erase them too. (like D: E: F:)

klaas4 (2194points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…
ben's avatar

If you still have an old Windows CD, then you should reformat the harddrive and reinstall Windows. To do this, restart the computers with the CD inside and this should be an option.

Don’t start formatting/erasing anything until you find one of those original CDs. You should be able to do everything you need straight from the Windows reinstall menus.

When you’re done, it will be just like new. Depending on which version of Windows you’re reinstalling, you may need unique/CDs licenses for each machine—can anyone else clarify this?

ben (9085points)“Great Answer” (1points) Flag as…
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