I am about to sell my old laptop. I was wonderin how to get all my personal crap off of it. I have heard that I sould format the hard drive and reinstall everything but everytime I try to format it a box comes up and says that I cant do that, plus I don't have the disk that came with it to re do it , What should I do. The laptop is a dell insperon with windows xp.
find any windows CD and boot into it, and format it there.
so a windows vista cd will work?
A windows vista cd will work thanks for the advice Xout!
Now you just totally wiped your drive, hope you saved any documents you needed before this. As you have figured out, you can use any windows CD to format your computer. This makes it BLANK with no files on it, and the person you sell it to will need to install their own Operating System on it.
I used a windows vista cd to do it and then loaded vista onto the computer and reinstalled all the drivers. It works great