renovation

i have the dell desktop here at my home and the familys asked me to pull all the info off it . this is not a problem at all . but they need to return it to dell as it was a lease unit .
this is the same family computer of the friends who were killed by there son 6 months ago.
here is were i can use a bit of advice. would you total wipe the drive or just do a factory recovery. im thinking of doing a total wipe and then just leave it as a blank hard drive .no os or anything on it .
what you think

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Markel

Have you checked into Dell's policy on the return condition of leased units? (Just in case there's something about "working condition" somewhere in the agreement.) If so, it may be better to reinstall the OS and drivers (assuming you have the recovery media). I would also do a wipe of the drive, being sure that you are wiping the main partition, and not the non-DOS partition that Dell puts on their drives (works with the recovery CD) - best if you can do it from a bootable CD, then reinstall the OS. (And by "wipe" I mean using a program such as Eraser, not just reformat the drive.)

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mojo

i would zero it out and then reinstall it all. can't complain if you do that.

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attgig

emphasis added....

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Jeffbx

Wipe it. They're going to reload it again anyway, so it really doesn't matter to Dell how it's returned. But for the protection of the user, you'll want to use Eraser or DBAN to really wipe it clean.