OT-Giving old laptop away

[pheasant16]

Broke friend's 80yo mom. Wants to read email and browse internet.

Have an old Dell Inspiron 3800 Pentium 3 600mHz with 256mb ram, and 40GB
hard drive to donate.

Other than a complete format to wipe it clean, and start with Dell XP cd
(not even SP1 on it) install, can someone recommend a program to assure
I've cleaned my private data out?

I'll use add/remove for programs, but an a little concerned I may miss
something, and when she passes away, throws it out, etc. someone a bit
more savvy could find something I missed.

Thanks

 

[Same Guy]

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 06:21:31 -0400: written by Agent_C

They'll be no end to the phone calls... Don't do it!

This is a valid concern. I gave my mom an old system of mine as well as
built a new system for my step-dad.

Call after call about weird things and I remoted in repeatedly to show
them how to do simple tasks. At some point I had to get brusk and tell
my own mom that she needed to figure this stuff out herself because I
had already shown her once. It is easier w/one's own mom, but do you
want to be responsible for upsetting a friend's mom? Make sure your
friend is on the hook for support.

A few of the weird things for which I received calls:

Firefox would 'disappear'. Somehow my mom caused the browser window to
minimize to a little over the size of a postage-stamp. I'd fix it so
that it would not minimize to that size again, but it kept reoccurring.
I have yet to figure out how she does this and every now and then when I
remote-in, I see a few instances of Firefox floating around minimized to
this size.

My step-father would have the Windows Search window pop up and there
seemed to be no rhyme or reason for why it would do this. They were
never able to reproduce it consistently and whenever I remoted-in, I
never saw it occur. Lot's of complaints about it and a desire for me to
fix it. :-/

Since I live in a different state from my folks, dropping-by to take a
look isn't an option, so when I was back there, I heard the complaints
again and I again asked if they could reproduce it. They said that if
he clicks the mouse too hard, that it occurs.

I asked to be shown this behavior and sure enough, it occurred. So I
looked at the mouse and apparently he had bought one of those
multi-function mice which had a Windows Search button that he was
clicking when being too aggressive w/the mouse. I *never* would have
figured that out w/out being there (because I think that is an awful
place to put such a button)

This is but two examples and it is a royal PITA.

Think long and hard before being generous here and I agree w/Agent_C:

Don't Do It!


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[Mike Easter]

pheasant16


They'll be no end to the phone calls... Don't do it!

I agree that there should be some kind of plan about what is going to
happen about the support, which I think should be coming from the friend
above, not the friendly source of the hardware.

That means that the friend needs to be able to support whatever kind of
OS and software is on the machine.

That isn't going to work out very well with the default XP with no SP,
nor would it be a happy situation with some insecure browser/OS
combination like IE6.

Depending on what the friend is familiar with or could be made to be
familiar with, maybe the OS should be a linux distro. If that idea is
out of the question, then I think that the XP OS should be brought up to
SP3 and the browser condition should be a secure one, however that might
best be achieved considering the support friend's skills and preferences.

If the idea is that you the OP are supposed to be the support person, I
would think that isn't exactly fair of your friend to expect that.