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MY wife is taking her netbook in for service and wants to:

a) save everthing she has on it and;
b) remove all her personal information and items from it.

What would be the best way to accomplish both of these?

Remove the hard drive before turning it in for service, then store said drive in a safe place.
Most notebooks allow reasonably easy access to the drive.

--Patrick

That works if the service has nothing to do with the information therein - like the screen or memory. But even then the techs wouldn't be able to test when they were done.

What I'd do would be to backup to a DvD or external drive and then do a total reinstall of the OS, which should format the drive and create a totally clean box.

When you reinstall the OS it does not full erase your personal data from the machine. They could if they wanted to still retrieve the old data from the HDD. What you need to do is after reinstalling the OS get a program that writes over all your extra space with a wiping algorithm (it basically writes over your old data with random ones and zeroes) . CCleaner and Revo Uninstaller are both are free and offer both that option.

Dave said:

What I'd do would be to backup to a DvD or external drive and then do a total reinstall of the OS, which should format the drive and create a totally clean box.

Click to expand...

If you format the entire drive to do the reinstall. My netbook is partitioned into 3, two visible and one hidden. The hidden partition contains a drive image and, though I've never tested it, I think that using the restore feature resets the C: drive, but leaves D: alone.

Okay then I'll revert back to my first response that I never put:

How to wipe a notebook? Use a damp rag.

HCGLNS said:

MY wife is taking her netbook in for service and wants to:

a) save everthing she has on it and;
b) remove all her personal information and items from it.

What would be the best way to accomplish both of these?

Click to expand...

PatrThom said:

Remove the hard drive before turning it in for service, then store said drive in a safe place.
Most notebooks allow reasonably easy access to the drive.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

The question is, does it HAVE a hard drive??? Or does it have a SSD chip?

Disk Redactor - Very useful, even helps revitalize old flash drives.

--Patrick

Thermite.

That's not thermite, that's your average Western Digital hard drive 1 week past the warranty date.

sitting.

GasBandit said:

That's not thermite, that's your average Western Digital hard drive 1 week past the warranty date.

Click to expand...

Zing! Bwa Ha!! sad but true..