i am looking at this compaq laptop. I have no PASSWORD and the owner is a guest of the county for about 6 monthes. I think the first thing u do with used equipment is do a cmplete restore to erase all of her stuff. But I cannot locate all the identifying numbers to determine the correct restore data that i need to obtain. sorry to be so wordy but a. is this a good idea? b am i correct that i need to do a complete restore with a recovery disk?You dont need to do a recovery, you need to format and partition.  You need an OS disk.  Or find the person who is selling it and get the password from them, actually he should've formated it before he decided to sell it.  Find what Operating system you want and GO from there.For windows o.s, complete restore with recovery disk might be ok.

Like if you buy a computer from made by compaq, and you restore with compaq's provided restoration system or cd without issues, it would be REVERTED back to the way it was before you EVEN touched pc the first time. if you go that route, make sure you restore it to the factory, it would be pointless to restore it to an earlier state unless you want to use some of the programs that are already on there. Quote from: nalee on June 01, 2009, 12:20:31 PM

if you go that route, make sure you restore it to the factory, it would be pointless to restore it to an earlier state unless you want to use some of the programs that are already on there.