Selling your PC? Here’s the way to remove data permanently

When you use a computer for years, you naturally keep a lot of personal and professional stuff on it. Normally, you’d want to keep this information secure but when it’s time to sell/trade that PC for a new one, you may want to back-up and delete everything permanently. Now, if that seems a bit complicated, here’s a guide to help.

First up, back-up everything from the system

When you decide to sell a PC, keep some time to prepare your machine for the transaction.

As the first step, copy everything that’s on the system, from personal photos/videos to work-related documents and anything else that may be of importance, on an external drive.

Next, go to Windows’ backup from the control panel and create a full system image on the same drive.

Backup is an insurance of sorts

The backed-up data and system image will stay on the external hard drive in the form of an insurance of sorts. You’ll be able to move everything to the new machine easily and also have the option of restoring the old one if needed.

De-register paid software

After backing up data, check your computer for software tools licensed to run on a single computer.

This could be your anti-virus or any other program with a 1PC license; if you don’t find such software, move to the next step.

But if you do, make sure to de-register your computer for that program, otherwise its license key won’t work on your new machine.

Now, look at the clean-up options

Normally, most of you would prefer Windows 10’s ‘Reset PC’ utility to delete everything from a computer.

But, here’s the thing, the clean-up mechanism of Windows 10 offers a consumer-level solution and not a full sweep.

This means if a professional hacker or someone with a specialty software would want to steal your data, they’d be able to recover it even after the reset.

Pick a specialty software for wiping data

While Windows 10 does a decent enough job at resetting PC, we’d recommend going for third-party specialty software ‘Eraser’ for deleting all the data from hard drives……..Read More>>

 

Source:- newsbytesapp