How to Sell a Laptop: 15 Steps with Pictures

With that said, selling the computer your own will probably get you more money. But it also requires more time and effort because you have to create a compelling listing, take good pictures, monitor market prices, respond to offers and negotiate, etc. On the other hand, selling via a buyback site is a hassle-free and streamlined experience, but for a lesser total cash payout. Let’s say your notebook has a copy of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop. Is it legal to leave the software on the portable, or should you delete it first? The good news is that copyright laws don’t prevent you from reselling software.

If you’ve been keeping up with the keynotes, you’ll know that Apple is finally transitioning towards 1080p webcams in the company’s best MacBooks, which makes them a great option. While it can be easy to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty of both of these key components, the best advice is to consider what you want to use the laptop for. Seeking a better deal, I tried Dell’s Trade up Program. This reveals the “Remove everything and reinstall Windows” on the right side of the page. Swipe down from the right edge of your touchpad to reveal Settings.

Power Checklist: New Workstation

A) Keep my files – Choosing this option will only erase the programs you installed on your PC. It will also reset any personalization or settings made.

The system will take a minute or two to detect your storage devices. A menu screen will then appear, showing all of your drives and some other options. You can even use this method if the SSD you plan to wipe is the computer’s boot drive. The caveat with diskpart is that this method does not blank the overprovisioned blocks of the OS, but it does erase the disk map which references them. The method is effective enough that DriveSavers, a professional data recovery service, said that it should “do the trick,” but noted that they have not validated it with every hardware combo. When it comes to reselling used gaming laptops, the possibilities are plentiful. For example, you can list it on a marketplace like eBay or OfferUp.

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Below, I will outline the steps to remove everything in your device and reinstalling different versions of Windows. You can also use the same steps to reset your Surface tablet running Windows 8.1 or Windows 10. If you have a branded computer, you can use the following resources to wipe your system and reinstall the operating system, programs, and settings that came originally with the device. Also, if you use OneDrive, you’re pretty much all set, as you personal files already backed up in the cloud and ready to sync to any device you sign-in with your Microsoft account. We know that you have many options to sell your laptop, to a friend, eBay, Craigslist, etc.

She is always curious about computer knowledge and learns it crazily. Her articles are simple and easy to understand. Even people who do not understand computer can gain something. By the way, her special focuses are disk management, data recovery and PDF editing.

You have removed everything from your PC or laptop. Review your device details, select the box for “I’m ready to remove this device”, then select “Remove”. Also, remember that you can try selling your tablet, laptop, or computer to someone you know, you might not get the same amount of money, but it could save you a lot of online hassles. At this point, you will have a pretty good idea on the price to sell your device. Read more about Sell my laptop near me here. Once you have figured out the pricing, you’ll need to decide where you want to sell your Surface, laptop, desktop, or anything else in between.

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What are the Benefits of Using the Amazon Seller App?

If you’re browsing purely online, read and watch some reviews to get an idea of how the product performs and ages over time. Apple, naturally, does things a little differently, recently making the move to use its own proprietary chip called Apple Silicon. Certain apps will be optimized for this new tech and maybe run even better, though not everything has moved to support M1 and beyond. For example, a program may run on MacOS, though it may not be optimized for Apple Silicon. It’s good to watch out for curveballs like this when contending with Apple products if you have a need for specific apps. The best laptops are incredibly varied, with each device touting its own unique features to complement your on-the-go lifestyle.

Some experts claim that SSDs which have TRIM enabled — most modern SSDs — don’t need to be securely erase because the process purges deleted data in the background. Unfortunately, you can’t count on TRIM to purge all your blocks even if you attempt to force it by using Windows 10 or 11’s Optimize Drive feature. I took the drive I’d wiped with Windows 10’s reset feature and then ran Optimize Drive on it, but my sensitive files were still recoverable with EaseUS Data Recovery. Securely erasing an SSD is different than doing the same process on a mechanical hard drive. The best way to erase an HDD, which we’ll cover in more detail below, is to use a program that writes random data over all the sectors several times so that no remnants of the old files remain. No matter how nice a person you sell your computer or your bare drive to, you can’t trust that they won’t see what deleted files they can recover. Below we’ll explain how to securely erase an SSD using Windows and then explain how to do the same to a hard drive as the process is a bit different.