Old work laptop - worth keeping or worth risking its return?

[Thoughtcat]

A group of us at work have laptops (a Toshiba Portege Z30C188 to be precise) with Windows 10 and 8gb ram. Mine certainly has been great, though the battery life is obviously quite reduced now after a few years of use. It's not touch-screen, just a regular laptop.

Work are now giving us new laptops and saying we can pay £100 if we want to keep the old laptop, which covers having it wiped (leaving nothing on it but the OS). Otherwise they will take the laptop back, pay the £100 for the wipe themselves and then use a recycle/scrappage scheme where they get money back off the new laptop purchase for useful materials gained from unused equipment or repurposed and sold on.

I guess getting a used Toshiba laptop for £100 is not bad, though I'm just wondering what other companies do. It does seem slightly that if you're concerned about what may happen to any personal data on your laptop or where it ends up, you don't really have a choice except to pay work the £100 to keep it.

If I did give my laptop back, even though it'll be wiped I'd still want to do some wiping myself beforehand, so is there any recommended process for doing this? I used to use Window Washer years ago but not sure if it still exists or if it's even needed, or if it's possible to just manually empty the right folders etc.

[Dio]

Extract the Windows key, take the HD out and hit it a few times with a lumphammer, give them the bits, buy a £50 SSD.

[RiK]

It's a work laptop, so why have you got personal information on it anyway?

What's so sensitive that you can't simply remove it yourself?

[Thoughtcat]

It's a work laptop, so why have you got personal information on it anyway?

I've often used my work laptop for some personal things. Otherwise I'd be carrying around two laptops all the time. I can't be the only person who's ever done this.

What's so sensitive that you can't simply remove it yourself?

It's more ID and financial stuff, like I've made card payments on websites and done online banking. I've got some personal files saved here and there. I can easily locate the files and transfer them off. I assume I just clear browser cookies and passwords and autofill info and then delete the browser. I was just wondering if any files or login details leave shadow copies anywhere in Windows, or if there's a recommended procedure to follow before you sell a laptop or give it to someone etc.

In previous years work have always just let me keep my old laptop for free after deleting any work-related stuff.

[Dio]

If you have no idea where the machine's going later, that's definitely not sufficient.

[Rhythm]

For the purposes of companies selling laptops they either need the hard drive (or SSD) removing or they need to be wiped by a proper forensic tool. It needs to be one of those tools that wipes and rewrites junk data before wiping again. From memory the guidance is that you need to do this at least three times. The best option is, as Dio says, take the storage out and whack a nail through it before replacing with a cheap SSD.

This has always been a thing but, since GDPR, if company data (or, more importantly, data that could identify customers) gets out then they're legally proper fucked (actual technical term).

[KlaxonCow]

if there's a recommended procedure to follow before you sell a laptop or give it to someone etc.

Yes, pull out the hard drive.

Either keep it in your possession - you can install it on a new machine as a second hard drive - or, as Dio says, physically destroy it.

I'd suggest fire, rather than a hammer. Smashing a platter to pieces could be seen as a "jigsaw puzzle" to the very determined. But if you actually physically melt the materials then you are entropically taking it to places from whence nothing can ever come back. Or, you know, to be really sure, melt the bugger first and then smash it with a hammer.

Indeed, I tend to do the "second hard drive" thing, because the advantages are: I can copy old data / settings I want to keep from it to the new hard drive, I now have more disk space and I'm keeping the hard drive in my possession and not handing it over to anybody else.

But, yeah, what Dio's saying is the correct answer. Basically, treat hard drives as consumable items, and you can't go wrong. Now that your data has touched it, consider it "used". Either keep it in your possession and re-use it, or remove it and smash it to pieces (or, you know, eventually, you will end up smashing it to pieces, even if you do re-use it, as it'll eventually break or just become useless with age. Or, you know, you keep it around so long that they actually change the hard drive connection standards in the meantime - because, yeah, that's happened to me and I think I've still got an IDE hard drive around here somewhere, but no motherboard supports that anymore).

And though Moore's Law is not as good as it once was, it still remains the case that today's cheap low tier hardware was yesterday's state-of-the-art.

So, you know, remove the hard drive and then spend £100 on a nice new SSD. It'll undoubtedly have much more capacity and superior performance.

But, yeah, the recommended procedure is "remove the hard drive". Do not hand that onto someone else. Keep it for your own continued use. Or, if you have no use for it, then physically destroy it.

Seriously, the FBI and other agencies have specialist data recovery equipment that directly reads the magnetism on a platter, and can actually pick up the "phantoms" of overwritten data. Like, past magnetic states can be guessed at, extrapolated and old data reconstructed.

This is an expensive and involved process. So unless you're a Very Important Person and your data is state secrets or worth billions of dollars, no-one is going to, in reality, ever be bothered to do that, just to see your "Pornhub" browsing history. But, yes, it is actually physically possible to do this stuff.

Treat hard drives like toilet paper. Once you've wiped your arse with it, there's no going back. Dispose of it.

(Also, consider that hard drives do gradually fail anyway. You mention that, yup, with years of use, the battery on that laptop won't hold a charge as well as it used to. And, you know, it ain't the only component in your laptop that's slowly degrading over time. I've had lots of broken old components over the years - power supplies, keyboards, graphics cards, etc. - but by far the biggest graveyard is hard drives. It is, most likely, the first thing that will break. So there's also the wisdom that though you can re-use it - or give it to someone else to continue using it - then you probably shouldn't anyway. Not just for privacy / security, but just because if someone gives you a laptop with, say, a 10 year hard drive in it - that got hammered from daily use - then it's a miracle it's still alive, and it won't last that much longer, most probably.)

And, seriously, for £100, you can get yourself a nice good quality 1TB SSD (plus change from £100), greatly improving your laptop's performance.

[Rhythm]

And, seriously, for £100, you can get yourself a nice good quality 1TB SSD, greatly improving your laptop's performance.

Closer to 2tb these days. Saying this because I just upgraded one of my M2 NVME drives - £120 for a fast 2tb

[KlaxonCow]

Closer to 2tb these days. Saying this because I just upgraded one of my M2 NVME drives - £120 for a fast 2tb

Yeah, probably.

As I stated, though Moore's Law ain't what it used to be, it does still apply. What cost you £500 years ago, is probably beaten by something that costs £50 today.

So, yeah, I don't doubt that it's closer to 2TB than 1TB by now. Haven't bought a laptop for a few years now, so not au fait with the exact prices.

(Indeed, you can see - as you posted while I was editing - that I edited that bit to say "plus change" because, yeah, I did take a quick Google at prices to see and they have gotten cheaper since I was last purchasing an SSD. And the point is... that always happens all the time. Constantly. That's how tech pricing works.)

[noodles]

Normally, if you're keeping the machine for yourself, you would just reinstall from the system partition where the OEM usually supplies a ready-to-install
Windows onto the main partition where your info and the old install is located. You have the option, if I remember correctly, of formatting the latter before the reinstall of the system (not a quick format, of course).

If you're worried about company info but want to keep the disk, then you use a special tool that deep formats and rewrites random stuff onto the disk before a second format of the partition.
But, as mentioned already, if you have super sensitive company stuff on it, it's hammer time.

[KlaxonCow]

But, as mentioned already, if you have super sensitive company stuff on it, it's hammer time.

How did I miss the "meme potential" on that one?

[Dio]

As I stated, though Moore's Law ain't what it used to be, it does still apply.

For flash, actually it pretty much does. They haven't been relying on process shrinks so much so they're not running into the atom count limit so badly, and as far as I'm aware they've got a roadmap out for a couple of decades.

[venusian]

I'm a bit puzzled.

The reason you have personal data on the laptop is because you don't want to carry around a second one. But you're thinking of paying £100 for an old laptop (that your don't want to carry around). That doesn't seem like a good deal to me.

Wipe your data, keep your money!

[gilesgoat]

If the laptop is decent and you think it's worth 100 pounds why don't try to keep it/wipe it yourself and/or just like Dio suggested "hammer time" ? You can't have better than this ( and fire probably ). If it's worth 100 probably it's still worth 150 with another SSD disk ?

UNLESS .. UNLESS it's an HP Pavillon .. then it's worth 100 for the pleasure to reduce it to tiny bits with a sledgehammer !

[edit] @K_C: I think once I saw some documentary about certain Google servers they really have "a metal shredder" the reduce HDs that need to be destoryed into pulp.

[Little stoned kiwi]

You'll probably have to replace the SSD anyway due to wear, along with the battery, and it will need more RAM to really remain usable.

If you keep it or not, see if smashing the drive with a hammer is a viable option instead of getting it wiped.