I bought myself a laptop before Christmas as my computer was not the greatest and I wanted to clear some space in my room.

However I'm going to either give the computer away or try get a few quid for it but I need to wipe it as I've got so much crap on it! I've had it for 5 years. One problem is I don't have a Windows XP disk, how would I go about wiping it all and starting again.

Cheers in advance.

So you intend to wipe it and give it away as a computer without an operating system?

If that's the case you'll end up having to pay someone to take it

If you do intend to get rid of as a PC without windows there is still a way you can format it.

depending on who built the PC you could do a destructive recovery, wiping the system and reloading windows from the partition which would reset the PC to factoy conditions.

Does it have a restore partition? That's like a separate partition of the hard drive, reserved for restoring it back to what it was like when you first got it.

Do Dells have that?

Mine does

There's a 10Gb recovery partition


Edited: because I have a cold

So how do you know if it's there or not?

It'll show up in "My Computer"

You'll have a C:\ shown as your local disk and probably a D:\ shown as recovery partition.

What if you have a d drive known as "backup"?

Sounds to me like it's a partition dedicated to back ups of documents and system files from your C:\

Depends on manufacturer really... One mans restore partition could well be another mans backup.

And how much are you looking for for the pc?