wiping/reformatting vista desktop to sell...

[Poundmax]

Hey all,

So long story short, I'm selling one of my desktops to my cousin to make room for a new comp coming today. I want to do everything I can to truly make the comp feel "his" by getting everything setup to be like he's turning the computer on for the very first time, but there in lies the problem. I've never done anything such as a hard drive wipe or total reformat and my tune up software did a "full wipe" yesterday of my C and D (recovery) and took a few hours to run that yet nothing seems to be different at all.

I've heard of darik's (?) boot and nuke, but is that something I would want? I probably have all the windows install discs somewhere but would really not want to look for those if possible because to me that at least sounds like it will wipe off EVERY last little thing from the hd.

Any suggestions here? I know that ultimately since I am selling this to my cousin I'm not overly concerned with having private data protected but I just want him to have as much of a fresh start with a relatively clean slate as possible.

Thanks!

[Deleted]

Find all the drivers for the LAN card, chipset, sound card and such, boot off of your vista disk, format the drive and reinstall vista, reinstall all the drivers, do the updates. About as clean as you can get without wiping the drive 30times with window washer or something simular.

[lockblock]

Find all the drivers for the LAN card, chipset, sound card and such, boot off of your vista disk, format the drive and reinstall vista, reinstall all the drivers, do the updates. About as clean as you can get without wiping the drive 30times with window washer or something simular.

In addition to this you could also hit ctrl shift f3 right when windows is starting up after the first restart to enter audit mode then install drivers.
when finished with the drivers tick the generalize box on the sysprep window and select the shutdown option and ok it.
Then when he turns the machine on it will be like a store bought machine and let you pick initial settings like owner, system time and initial user accounts etc.