Sold a laptop I bought in 2018 for £100 this afternoon came to my house picked it up and all good. Buyer said he wanted something for his little sister to play Minecraft on. Which it should do!
Used Microsoft’s built in reset function to reset it. However, it has 2 drives, and I think the reset only clears the C drive.
And as embarrassing as it is to admit, I do remember downloading a bunch of porn on that laptop as well as such gaming classics as MilfyCity. Not your everyday typical stuff either. Very niche and not entirely straight!
I’m now panicking thinking there may be something left over. I’ve messaged him on FB marketplace to say double check if it’s wiped everything.
I’m just waiting for an angry message from some random guy, who now knows where I live, asking for his money back, and hopefully doesn’t completely expose my disgusting porn habits.
TL;DR. Sold laptop that could have porn on it, to some that may be giving the laptop to a child.
Comments
If you buy a laptop and don’t wipe the drive yourself before giving to your kid, that’s on you.
Not your problem anymore.
Never sell a laptop before wiping it clean. Never know where or who will have access to your stuff next. Forget your kinks, lots of other important information can lead to undesired results in the wrong hands.
I mean. The porn I wouldn’t be disgusted with. I definitely wouldn’t shine a black light on it tho. It would look like a crime scene I imagine.
Life lesson: Never sell any storage with the PC. Discard of it yourself, or keep it as a spare or buy a USB enclosure and use it for backups. But never sell used drives, if they are not deep cleaned.
I would always remove the drives before selling a PC.
So? How is this your problem? You tried.
It’s on the buyer to check if there’s porn on there. And even if there is and he doesn’t catch it, if his sister is above 15, she’ll likely KNOW what pornography is already.
The dude’s not going to want his money back. He got a working laptop for a hundo. Only way this can bite you in the ass is if you downloaded some illegal shit.
What type of laptop was it? It’s somewhat uncommon for a laptop to have two physical drives, especially one that’s 7 years old at this point. Makes me think that you just had a second partition on the physical drive. If you reset to factory, the laptop should have taken info from a recovery partition and wiped the drive, re-partitioned, and then reinstalled the OS.
Regardless, in the future, pull the drive. Even if Windows formatted the drive often times it does a quick format, which isn’t really erasing anything. It just wipes the file location information and marks that space as writable, so the OS will assume it’s empty and write over it. Sort of like taking a large book and just removing the table of contents. Anyone that wants to skim through the pages can rebuild the table of contents and get all the information out.