How to securely wipe a drive before selling your laptop

You don’t want some stranger getting a hold of this information. That’s why many people choose to take the hard drive out of a computer and keep it before trading or recycling the rest. Before buying that shiny new computer and ditching your old one, ensure you get all of your data off the old one first. Use an external hard drive, a cloud backup like Dropbox or Google Drive, or writable DVDs to make a copy of your data. Check your backup to make sure it has everything you want on it before you move on. If you used a Microsoft account to sign in to the laptop, the last thing you’ll want to do is remove the laptop from that account.

We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. Read more about Sell our laptop here. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. You might also perform a factory reset to freshen up your laptop. It provides a clean slate, which helps you feel you’ve downloaded too many apps and files and don’t want to pick through them one-by-one. Your Asus laptop will begin its factory reset once you tap Reset.

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You might think that resetting Windows 10 or 11 with the option to delete your files enabled would get rid of all your personal data, but, as our tests provide, that’s not the case. It almost goes without saying, but just deleting a file doesn’t make it completely disappear.

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When it’s complete, DBAN will show you a message stating that it has wiped all the drives you assigned to it. Depending on the number of passes, the capacity of your drive and its speed, this could take a few minutes or several hours. Use the J and K keys to move up and down and hit space to select the drive, which will now say “wipe” next to it. “This is an expected result from experience,” DriveSavers Director of Engineering Mike Cobb told us.

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At the top of your to-do list on getting your device ready for sell is to make a full backup of your system. This step is always a good thing to do, as this might be the only way to recover if something were to go wrong, or you change your mind and you want to keep your computer for a little longer. List the specifications of your laptop like screen size, CPU, graphics card, RAM, and hard drive space for the viewers to analyse. Take good quality photos, showing off the best parts of your laptop.