How to Dispose Laptop Safely?

4 minutes read
Written By
Updated On

Laptops are used to accomplish daily work by saving huge amounts of personal and official data. Laptops have many advantages over desktops like portability, reliability, and built-in mouse, keyboard, and speaker. However, there are some users who want to dispose of old laptops which is not an easy job. Such users should follow some reliable way to properly dispose of old laptops.

Don’t throw away laptops because, like any other electronic gadgets, laptops have some hazardous substances that are very harmful to the environment. Instead, users can opt for, re-selling, donating, or recycling laptops.

  • Re-Selling: Some people and organizations buy used laptops so it is better to resell old laptops instead of throwing them.
  • Donate: Many organizations collect old laptops and computers and give them to charities.
  • Recycle: User can give their old laptops to the manufacturer who has some programs to recycle laptops and their components.

Above are some ways in which you can opt, but before opting you have to take some precautions, because these ways have some limitations with respect to data security. Disposing of old laptops or other data storage devices with data in them may invite many threats to the user, so proper methods must be carried out to erase data from them. The laptop may contain many important details like bank account numbers, photos, contact numbers, videos, confidential office files, private files, tax details, and a lot more. If such laptops are improperly disposed then there are chances that they might fall into the wrong hands and data stored in it might be misused. Luckily, there are several easy methods that users can follow to safely dispose of old laptops.

How to clear all personal data stored in Laptop hard drive?

It is highly recommended that the user should take a backup of all important files and folders from the laptop hard drive before disposing of it. One can maintain backup using cloud service or external drives like USB drive, external hard drives, etc. Let one thing be clear; simply erasing files from a laptop hard drive won’t erase everything permanently. Anyone can easily recover such data using some data recovery software.

Following are some steps that users should carry out to erase files from Laptops:

  • Uninstall programs like Microsoft Outlook as it may contain some personal information
  • Delete browsing history as browsers may save information about browsing history and may also save usernames and passwords to some particular sites.
  • Laptop hard drive data should be wiped out completely so that strangers cannot access the data stored in it.

However, users may delete data from the laptop by using the Shift Delete combination keys or may format the hard drive to erase data from the laptop before disposing. However, this does not remove files from the laptop permanently and strangers can easily recover it by using some third-party data recovery software. After reading this information, you might be thinking about how to completely erase my laptop before re-selling, donating, or recycling, to prevent misuse of data from it. The easiest way of erasing a laptop hard drive is a few clicks away, you just have to use the Remo Drive Wipe tool. It will wipe out all the information from the laptop by using shredding patterns and make the recovery impossible by any data recovery utility.

About the Author: Tony Landry

Tony Landry is a Web Content Editor at Remo Software. He loves to write, edit, and manage content for users trying to troubleshoot and fix problems on Windows, Outlook, storage drives, and Cloud storage networks. With an aptitude that transcends writing, Tony is recognized as a Microsoft Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint expert. His comprehensive solutions…