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Posted

Hi folks ... I need to take the wife's HP Pavilion laptop to be repaired [backlight has failed, apparently] -- and I'm nervous about leaving it in someone else's unknown hands with the various saved passwords and account numbers and such that have accreted on it over the last 3 years. So, it's running XP home edition. She normally uses Firefox as browser, but also on occasion IE, Outlook Express, PayPal, ebay, who knows what all; she commonly shops over the net and pays with credit cards. Is there some way to get it all short of wiping the disk? Would deleting her username do any good? I could easily make a ghost image of the drive and then overwrite it with zeroes, but fear that might be seen as an issue by the repair people -- they might need to reload XP to test the fix? As it is, I can attach an external monitor to it, in which case it works perfectly, and I can access it from my home lan. There's just no backlight on the normal screen after it boots. TIA for any useful advice. I would prefer to do the least possible to keep it safe, hoping some expert here can tell me what that is.

Guest LilBambi
Posted

Many folks these days will just pull the hard drive and they can put their own in or boot from a CD to diagnose and/or verify the display is fixed.

Posted (edited)

I ran this program http://www.windowpassword.com/ on a computer I brought home dead from a friend just to be sure I had cleared out all his information once I got the computer resuscitated with a new power supply. Since I don't have any disks with it, a clean install wasn't possible. The best I could manage was a thorough cleaning and then an image so I'd have something to use.Note: After I ran it (the computer was not connected to the internet), AVG started complaining about a trojan dialer and a few other files. It could be the result of how this programs digs to find the passwords. Anyway, I've removed the program after being sure that no personal info and passwords are on but I still get AVG warnings. I think leftovers from the restore part of XP from examining the path. You might decide it isn't worth the headache.

Edited by zlim

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