Restore to factory settings

[bigboss]

I'm replacing my Sony Vaio Pro 13 for another one, as the wifi adapter is flaky (although Sony have released a driver update only today, but TNT is coming tomorrow to collect the laptop).

What's the best & easiest way of deleting everything & restoring the laptop to the state it was shipped in?

 

[pantechnicon]

Hi,

Looks as though at least some models of Vaio have a recovery partition from which you can do this:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=98GGk_rMCm8

However, although it will delete everything it won't necessarily make the data completely unrecoverable to someone determined enough (if the disk blocks aren't physically overwritten then theoretically the files can be recovered), so if you've had anything particularly confidential on there it might not be enough.

P

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

Products like CleanMyPC will secure erase and over-write the disk areas where the files were with zeros up to three times. It's a bit of a convoluted process and it won't treat empty space. There are, I believe, programs out there that will do both, however.

That should solve your goat p&rn problem