Dead laptop question.

Factual Questions
1

A few weeks ago while in New Zealand, my 5 year old Emachines laptop quit working. The power button light would light when the button was depressed but there were no other functions, the screen did nothing, the mouse would not light and the cooling fan would not run. I took it to a computer shop in Rangiora and was told the mother board was defective and it would cost $450 NZ to repair. That was more than I paid for it. Ended up buying another laptop at a Warehouse store, $699 NZ out the door. (ouch)

Now that I am home I have had a chance to dink around with the old laptop. So far all I have really accomplished was removing the hard drive and inserting it in a hard drive case, now I can get everything off the hard drive that I want plus I can use it as an external drive in the future.

I have decided to make an attempt to sell the old laptop on Ebay without the hard drive, figure there might be someone else that can use it for parts. I have seen a couple in various states of disrepair sell recently in the $50 to $75 range, this would be fine with me.

My question is, without the hard drive, is there anything left on the laptop that could be used against me? It has 2 gigs of memory in it, it was suggested I remove that too.

2

No - if you remove the hdd and any other storage (memory cards etc) you should be safe. There is nothing practically useful to be found from the RAM sticks.

3

Unless this PC includes nonvolatile (e.g. Flash) memory in some form, it’s hard to see how you’d need to do more than remove the HDD.

4

I’ve heard of being able to read RAM memory that has been turned off for seconds or minutes. I wouldn’t worry about the RAM.

5

RAM won’t hold data for any length of time without power, and in something like an Emachines might not be removable in any case. You’re fine.

6

Removing the RAM is easy, remove 1 small screw, spread a couple plastic clips and it pops right out.