Preparing my laptop for selling

[MatthewOU2015]

Hey guys!

I recently sold my laptop on eBay and had some concerns. First concern is wiping everything on it. Will factory resetting wipe my drives? Second concern is the OS. I bought it as a windows 7 PC, but upgraded it to windows 8.1, and was wondering how I can get my product key so the future user can install windows on it.

Thanks

[lockblock]

Magic Jellybean keyfinder.
Then after performing a factory reset I would use the secure erase function built into Piriform Recuva to zero out the freespace.

[Ciddy]

Belarc Advisor is usually my way of doing this. Run that and save the html page it generates to a USB stick or something (or just print it out). I like to run that before I wipe something because it gives me a good list of software/updates I have installed, license keys, etc.

edit: Belarc is my way of getting product keys, that is. It doesn't have any kind of secure erase functionality. I'd go with running the factory restore first, then use something like CCleaner's drive wiper (with the "wipe free space" option).

[Cilraaz]

As for wiping your drives, if you want no data to be recoverable (or at least as little chance as possible), then check out something like Active@ KillDisk to properly wipe your hard drives. This will use a DoD-level wipe, which is about as secure as you can get.

For an SSD, check out the tips on this page instead of using the above app.