I’ve replaced my aging and failing HP laptop with a new one. That’s the good news. The changeover was very easy, as the new computer basically ‘sees’ whatever is on the old one and installed it.
The problem is in getting rid of the old one. I’ve noticed that after I installed Apple Plus as an icon on the new computer’s Chrome home page, it also appeared on the old computer’s home page as well. This seems to indicate that any change I make to the old laptop is also going to be reflected on the new laptop, which would include deletions. I really don’t want that to happen, but I need to delete everything off the old one prior to getting rid of it.
I guess I need a short tutorial on how to wipe the old computer without the changes affecting the new computer, if that makes sense.
An easy fix is once have everything off the old laptop and the new is configured just so, is to take the old laptop offline. It will no longer sync. You can then do whatever you want to it, reformat it, restore factory defaults, use dedicated zeroing software to overwrite everything…
Or just do what I do with old laptops, do a quick reset and then strip the hard drive out and pull it apart to get the magnets for projects (well, not so much on modern SSDs, but I do have tons of weirdly shaped magnets from the old spinning disc types).
OF course, all of this assumes you’re not reselling the device. Which considering the value of old electronics (especially if they’re failing) is probably a good assumption. Anyway, if you’re okay using just the native windows wipe option (which is probably fine for 95+% of users though not all), here’s a webpage with a “how-to” for various flavors of Windows that might be on an old machine.
TBH, the best decommissioning processes start with the computer booting into a nonstandard OS (like from a USB drive) that doesn’t try to access the network.
That way also prevents the normal OS from interfering with the deletion.
If you’re not going to use the old one anymore, just use Window’s built-in “Reset your PC” function on the old one (described further down the page in ParallelLines’s link). It should work fine for this and won’t affect the new computer.
But also, the homepage icon syncing is just a browser sync thing, if you’re logged in to your Google or Microsoft account on both computers. It won’t automatically delete old files on the old laptop unless you’re also using some file syncing solution on both (like OneDrive).