I have an old laptop that I want to give to my mum as she's currently stuck with an iPad. I'm a naughty boy though so I preferably need to remove any traces of smoking and porn. Anything you lads would recommend and is there anything you recommend I install for a pensioner when I set her up?
At a minimum I need to give it a fresh install and use a can of gas to get rid of all the tobacco crumbs. I'll probably have to open it up and shake out the crumbs as well. I'll be a bit paranoid if that's the limit though, maybe replace the fan?
Doing a clean reinstall of Windows is dead easy now, you just download the Fresh Start tool and it does everything in a couple of clicks. The Windows license is tied to the motherboard, so you don't need a CD key. If you install Teamviewer, you can remotely connect to her computer when she inevitably needs tech support.
The tobacco is a harder problem - the smell of fags deeply permeates your stuff, but you can't really notice it yourself. If you take the machine apart, you'll probably find a gunky mixture of dust, fluff and tar covering the fan and heatsink. Personally, I'd tear down the machine and wipe down everything I can see with plenty of isopropanol; if you can't find isopropanol at a reasonable price, get a bottle of bio-ethanol from B&Q.
>>27488 I'm pretty sure a full OS reinstall will format the drives, so any trace of porn will be deleted. If you want to give the discs a good scrub, you could use CCleaner with adjusted settings for multiple overwrites but it'd be unncessary if your parent is a layman (and it'll take a long time to overwrite unused diskspace).
I'm guessing you could use a solvent to de-tar the fan and bodywork, if required. Get a little bottle of isopropl or something from the chemist, tell them you want it for degreasing/cleaning.
Speaking of CCleaner; the company was bought out by Avast a few years ago. Apparently the company is notorious for poor secuity and the program was compromised shortly after their takeover of Piriform. The problem was rectified but it's left me wondering - is it still a trustworthy program?
Don't bother - Microsoft provide a secure deletion tool that isn't horrendously suspect. Download it, run "sdelete -c" from the command line and it'll wipe your free space.
