Question on selling a laptop

[soulcougher73]

My wife wants me to sell her Sony VAIO laptop. I put windows 7 on it awhile ago. Is there a way to erase her name as the user/owener of computer if you are going to sell it?

What i mean is when it boots up it wont have her as the user and ask for her password? Ive erased everything on the computer so its pretty much stock stuff at this point. Just trying to figure out this last part so the next owner can create own user and password.

Thanks.

 

[Phynaz]

Wait, you did have an admin account, right? You didn't make your wife's regular account an admin account did you?

Yeah, I know you did.

Create an admin account. Use that account to delete your wife's account.

And do the same with her current machine. Users shouldn't have admin privileges.

 

[weovpac]

I at least would zero out the drive, or even better use DBAN. Then do a fresh install.

 

[soulcougher73]

Wait, you did have an admin account, right? You didn't make your wife's regular account an admin account did you?

Yeah, I know you did.

Create an admin account. Use that account to delete your wife's account.

And do the same with her current machine. Users shouldn't have admin privileges.

Most likely this is what i did as she was the only user. I will do this when i get home. Thanks.

 

[corkyg]

You really should wipe the drive and do a fresh install (restore) of the otriginal OS that came with the Vaio.

 

[zon2020]

You really should wipe the drive and do a fresh install (restore) of the otriginal OS that came with the Vaio.

+1

You want to do more than erase her user name. You want to do a complete wipe of the drive (not just erase it or reformat it, but do a secure WIPE of it).

There is all sorts of personal information on that hard disk that she woudln't want in the hands of some random purchaser.

 

[lakedude]

+1

You want to do more than erase her user name. You want to do a complete wipe of the drive (not just erase it or reformat it, but do a secure WIPE of it).

There is all sorts of personal information on that hard disk that she woudln't want in the hands of some random purchaser.

^This

Download the ISO for Puppy Linux, burn Puppy to a CD, boot Puppy from CD, use shell command "dd" to wipe drive. This will take a while.

Puppy
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=07235

iso burner
http://www.ntfs.com/iso_burner_free.htm

dd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda

or maybe (depending on what your hard drive is called in Linux)

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda

 

[zon2020]

For any ATA disk manufactured in the last ten years or so, the most secure method is to use the Secure Erase command embedded in the hard drive's firmware.

Easier said than done, and it may be easier to download and run DBAN (Derik's Boot and Nuke) but here's a utility to use Secure Erase if you want to try. It's a lot faster this way too.

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml