Would you buy a second hand laptop computer ?

Some folk are pretty paranoid and believe all the hype while others are lackadaisical about the risks

The easy answer is just do what you are happy with

Edited By Ady1 on 21/08/2017 09:53:36

If you are an intelligence you can use special techniques to recover data. A bit written as a 1 will have a slightly different analogue value if it was previously a 0 or a 1. In fact it will have a different value if its history was 100, 101, 110 or 111. It may even go back further than that and be detectable.

I imagine it is highly unlikely that the effort of decoding a drive in this way, given that the error rate must be quite high, is useful of anything other than attempting to recover bulk text and looking for key words and phrases etc.

I have decided to buy a new computer but nobody is doing any good deals on new laptops in Cairns at the moment so I will have to take what I can get. JB HIFI have two HP laptops. Both run Windows 10 : the 14'' costs $500 and has 4GB RAM, 1TB HDD and a 2.0 GHZ processor. The 15'' costs $600 and has 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD and a 2.5 GHZ processor. I spent an hour in the store today doing various things and the larger 15'' is definitely faster. I wanted a 14'' screen but I will have to go with the larger and faster computer.

Neither computer has a DVD reader/burner so I will have to buy an external device.

Edited By Brian John on 21/08/2017 10:20:31

Edited By Brian John on 21/08/2017 10:21:48

What to do if you buy a secondhand computer is one thing, disposing of it is an entirely different problem.

If I take on a secondhand computer, I reformat the disks and install a new operating system. That I think is sufficient to deal with any malware on the machine.

Safely disposing of an unencrypted computer is a much bigger problem. My personal data is valuable and so is yours! The easiest way of guaranteeing it's safety is to smash the disk.

Not very likely that MI5 are interested in me. Criminals might be. Don't forget that the 'criminal' might be a spotty kid who knows far more about computers than you do and enjoys technical puzzle solving. Earlier in the thread, someone mentioned buying a laptop containing material identifying the previous owner as the Halifax Bank. A deep look at the data on that machine might be very worthwhile.

However, the organisations most likely to have a serious go at your data are the police and/or tax authorities. An ex-colleague, and I would never have guessed what he was up to, is currently serving a well deserved prison sentence based on evidence recovered from his hard drive . Most of the data that got him banged up had been deleted.

Dave

I always thought that seven writes was enough to erase data on a HD?

**LINK**

I think I read somewhere that even the CIA considered this enough if a HD couldn't for some reason be physically destroyed.

You can wipe a disk clean to a bunch of zeros and 1's but it needs to be done sector by sector and it takes ages

Far more cost effective to trash it, chucking it into a furnace for example

Edited By Ady1 on 21/08/2017 11:28:23

Younger than my 2009 HP Pavilion running Linux so if you want to dispose of your 5 year old laptop I'll take it off your hands Chris

Hopefully not the whole laptop Ady!

Waste electronic equipment is the fastest growing problem for those of us in the industry. The replacement life cycle of modern consumer electronics is frightening given that they utilise most of the world's scarcest metals which will not be replenished once they are all built into equipment, either ones in use or redundant ones in landfills

So folks please think about the reuse or recycling options before you get rid of your unwanted electronic equipment. As previously discussed laptops that can't run the latest version of Windows will perform very happily running Linux. Community groups know this and can take unwanted laptops and install Linux and give some deserving person a fully functioning laptop that (to Micro$hafts displeasure) can do everything a normal human being needs just without Windows

It might be overkill - but the pleasure derived from doing it just cannot be measured!

On this tanget, This data talk only refers to old magnet storage aka Hard Drives, PC's that use Solid State Drives aren't affected. For magnetic drives, I would recommend Lowvel.

And talking on point with regards to the OP, the hard drive and a laptop's battery are the only two components that would bother me significantly. Lithium batteries can only be cycled so many times, and degrade if left fully charged all the time, or discharged too much. Hard drives have bearings, bearings have a finite life, eventually things start to go wrong.

On a slight tangent again, Windows 10 licences are digital, and stored on Micro$oft servers, so if your hard drive does fail, there's no panic with regards to finding your key code and registering the installation - you'd just install the same version of Windows 10 you had before, and select "i don't have a key", Micro$oft servers will recognise your system by it's various digital serial numbers and automatically re-active windows. It won't get your data back, but it's a hell of a lot easier to upgrade or change your hard drive and get a clean installation of windows.

In addition to my desktop machines I'm currently using 6 Notebook PCs, a mix of HP nc6400 and HP 6910p laptops, all are ex-corporate, on arrival all get a new hybrid HDD and as much RAM as they can support.

Checking the minimum age of these will tell you that talk of planned warranty period obsolescence is utter BS.

- Nick

I used to do a lot of laptop repairs mainly the bga rewoking a lot will fail soon especially some of the hp laptops they were always failing on the BGA chips

ian