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Deleting Everything But Windows from a Used Laptop

Reader Bev Lammert wrote to ask me:

Hi Terry, Was happy to see how to operate WinPatrol, hadn't any idea you could right click within. Thank you. I have a quick question for you. I have a 2002 Sony Vaio laptop which has only 256 Ram running XP Home. My friend give it to me long time ago so was going to use it for just my Pogo game playing and our Sports Connection program but the Hard Drive pie shows solid green full. I do not want to save anything on it, just wipe it so it is empty as possible without losing Windows XP. Is this possible? Thank you ahead of time and thanks again for all the newsletters. Bye

I wrote back to Bev to give her some suggestions.

She can just start in Control Panel > Add and Remove Programs. There, she'll find programs there that she can select and remove. After that, it's ok to remove the corresponding folders under C:\Program Files.

Some of these folders are not removed automatically because the program either was modified after installation, or because the program wrote some of its configuration or data files into the folder.

Almost everything in My Documents would be "fair game" for deletion.

The big challenge is wiping the drive without deleting or damaging Windows XP. If Bev's friend gave her the Windows XP OS cdrom or restore CD, she can reinstall Windows. Or, the Sony laptop may have a recovery partition on it that is designed to restore the C: partition to its factory-fresh state.

Copyright © 2009 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.