Safely setup a used computer - Step-by-Step Guide

hello and welcome to tech deals how to guide how to safely set up a used or refurbished computer to keep your information safe and secure who should watch this video anyone who either has or is thinking about buying a used or refurbished computer from any place Amazon eBay Craigslist or your buddy down at the office if you're going to buy a used or refurbished computer of any type you need to watch this video why is your information important to you what about your passwords to your online banking your email Facebook your online shopping where your credit cards are stored do you want that information to end up in the hands of bad people I don't either so two things can happen when you buy a used computer either one and this is the good thing you turn it on you boot it up and it boots to the normal Windows setup screen where it asks you for language timezone you have to then click on agree to all the legal stuff you have to set up an account and then it goes through multiple screens where it says we're now setting up your machine sit back and relax installing apps that is the normal Windows 10 installation process that happens on any machine if that happens then whoever you bought the computer from did what they should do which is to reset windows back to its factory shipping configuration so it does a clean install when you turn it on so you can set it up yourself without any issues the image that's that's installed when it goes to that whole process is a compressed encrypted image that is signed by Microsoft and it won't install if it's not secure so you're good the second thing that can happen is actually what happened to me with this machine this computer here I bought off of ebay I paid just over $100 for it it's a five year old machine and it came with Windows already installed on it great right except I booted it up and it went straight to the Windows desktop that is a problem and if that happens to you you should not use the computer until you have fixed this problem but not to worry it's not too hard to fix and I'm going to show you how to do that in this video first of all why is this a problem you don't know what's installed on here in this particular case and this is a real example this is actually what prompted this video this is set up as preferred customer is the user on this I booted it up and it came to the desktop and they already set up an account they already installed updates and most importantly the company I bought this from installed almost ten different programs that may or may not be the proper versions how am I supposed to know what they really installed on here now in all likelihood they didn't do anything intentionally nefarious most people don't but how do I know their company's not infected with a virus or malware how do I know they don't have a disgruntled employee employee who's secretly installing stuff on each computer you know he's making $10 an hour refurbishing machines and he's angry and so he puts a keylogger or malware on there to mess with their customers I don't trust it and neither should you there's two ways to fix this problem the first way is to go to start click start click the Start menu go up 3-2 settings you want to update in security which is the on the far right side on the bottom row and then you want to come down for on the left-hand side of the screen to recovery you'll see reset this PC if you click get started on that it's going to ask you to choose an option keep my files or remove everything a properly installed version of Windows 10 should do this just fine if you want to choose remove everything and the reason is you don't want to keep any files that the previous owner had on the machine because you don't know if they're safe for secure you don't know if they were running the antivirus properly you don't know if they kept it up to date you just can't trust it why would you risk your personal information when you can just come in here reset Windows originally set it up for yourself and not have to worry about it now this is the easy solution if you click remove everything what it should ask is we just delete the files and reinstall windows or completely wipe the drive and it'll say use this if you're recycling or giving away or selling your computer you can choose the top at that point you would click remove everything and then you would choose the top option which is just delete the files and reinstall windows because you don't need to wipe the drive out with zeros unless you really want to but it'll take two or three hours at that point you can then walk away and leave and do something else go eat dinner go walk the dog it'll take anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour and a half to fully do depending upon the speed of your computer when it's done your machine will reboot and the Windows setup screen will appear asking for language and time zone and you can set it up like normal but what happens if this happens and this should not happen on a properly installed Windows 10 and let me tell you I have installed Windows 10 on dozens of machines at my house at my office which is where right now and for family and friends and other people I've never had this happen there was a problem resetting your PC Windows 10 includes the original installation files on the hard drive in case you ever want to reset it why is it not resetting that's a problem so we're going to go to the second solution if this happens to you let me show you how to fix this now first of all I highly recommend you do this on another machine don't do this on the used machine preferably do this on a machine that you trust you will need a USB thumb drive of at least four gigabytes in size which these days is not too hard to find they're all mostly that size but you'll need four gigabytes of a USB thumb drive then what you'll need to do I'm going to show you on this machine but I'm not going to use the thumb drive I create I actually have one that I made on my own machine that I trust that I'm actually going to use to wipe this but I'm going to show you how to make it the first thing you want to do is plug this into a USB port you want to open up Microsoft edge and then you want to type in Microsoft media creation tool there will be a link to this in the video description below to go to Microsoft comm and we want there we go looking to upgrade this PC upgrade now nope you want to scroll down the page to the white section need to create a USB DVD or ISO download tool now what this will do is it will make a clean Windows 10 installation media on your USB thumb drive directly from Microsoft comm so you can do a completely clean install totally wiping the drive that's in here when it's downloaded click run you can close your web browser now getting a few things ready this doesn't use any files on your machine this downloads the entire original installation of Windows 10 from Microsoft servers directly to your USB thumb drive you have to agree to the conditions it's going to ask you where you want to save if it's going to ask you oh well the first question is do you want to upgrade this PC now or create installation media for another PC click create installation media for another PC you don't want to upgrade this you don't to keep anything you want to wipe it so create installation next now by default these are grayed out and use recommended options for this PC or checked you actually probably can leave it that way if you want you can uncheck it and choose either 32 or 64-bit version of Windows or both you can choose Windows 10 Windows 10 home or Windows 10 and I'm going to leave it recommended options because that's fine that's going to use three gigabytes of the four gigabyte space hit next choose which media to use either create a USB flash drive or create an ISO file that has to be burned to a DVD in 2016 use a USB thumb drive it's easier if you for some reason don't have a USB thumb drive but you do have a writable DVD and a DVD burner you can do that too but we're going to create USB flash drive hit next now it automatically detects the USB Drive I plugged in I'm going to hit next it says warning the files on your USB Drive will be deleted to keep these files back them up now to another location next downloading Windows 10 this will take time I will trim the video when this is done we'll be back in just a second and we're back progress is 99% complete it's now going to verify the download I just wanted to cut in to show you that let me just make something perfectly clear 99 times out of 100 using a used computer that has somebody else's install of Windows on it is fine but what about that one time when it's not imagined limp foot this way would you be okay to pick up the telephone and call whoever you bought the computer from and tell them all your passwords to all of your online sites your online shopping your online banking your email and say man I can trust you right everything's cool no you don't want to death sounds completely ridiculous doesn't it well you're using their copy of Windows not yours you need to use your own copy again let me be clear if you turn the computer on and it goes to the normal initial Windows 10 setup asking all the prompts having you set it up okay that's one thing but when you just boot to the Windows desktop and it's logged in as preferred customer and they've installed 10 different programs you will forever be using somebody else's computer with your personal information I think that is a huge huge security risk and it's one I'm not personally willing to take now I showed you before when I clicked on remove everything it said there's an error we can't do it which means there's something wrong with the version of Windows that's on here that is a massive red flag so we're going to fix that problem by using an external USB thumb drive to completely format and wipe all the data off this drive and do a fresh installation of Windows 10 that we obtained ourselves directly from Microsoft on this machine now incidentally I'm going to be doing another video on this machine because actually I'm not installing it on the hard drive that's in here this computer is a five year old machine that came with a 500 gigabyte hard drive and I don't use hard drives because hard drives are terrible and slow and need to go away if you've noticed during this video I have got a Santa disc SSD sitting on my desk that will be replacing the hard drive in here as a side note if you buy a machine and you're going to do this anyway rather than bothering with the clone process because I've shown clones before on other machines to clone Windows from a hard drive to a solid-state drive if you're going to reinstall windows this is a great opportunity to do it don't even bother with the clone process take the hard drive out put the solid-state drive in make a USB thumb drive with Windows 10 on it install it clean to the solid-state drive and be done with it and we're back we are almost done now this took a little bit of time but this is something you can just let run and go do something else while you're waiting for it to finish downloading and creating the USB stick once you've got it created then you've got to reboot the machine and get the machine to boot from the USB stick now here's the trick how that works is different from machine to machine I can't give you one set of instructions one easy way to figure it out is if you google search how to boot from USB and the name of your computer you may find the instructions some computers want you to press f2 or f10 or f1 some computers want to you know control the lead or you know that it's a different combination of keys on each machine so I can't just tell you what key will boot to a USB thumb drive in addition some machines will only boot to a USB Drive plugged into some places it's maybe only the back ports maybe only the the top port on the back most machines will boot to a USB Drive in any port but especially if it's an older machine some older machines were pickier about it then say new machines are which generally don't care we are 98% complete so it says your USB flash drive is ready at this point you click finish setup is cleaning up not that we care because we're going to wipe this now at this point we need to reboot them machine boot from this and I will show you how we're going to format the drive and we're back I have now set this machine to boot from the USB thumb drive rather than the hard drive so that we can now securely set up windows format the included drive and put a fresh copy of Windows 10 on from Microsoft now whether or not you need a product key is going to depend upon the specific machine you have and whether or not it has a sticker on it or has a what's called digital token from Microsoft if it was previously upgraded from Windows 7 or Windows 8 it should have a digital token so that you actually don't need a product key and we'll see that as we go through the installation process which I will show you as you can see it says language to install English we'll hit next and we're going to choose install now setup is starting now this is running off of that USB thumb drive which I have plugged into the back of the computer activate Windows ok click I don't have a product key if you don't have one at the moment if you do because there's a sticker on the case go ahead and put that in once you've either clicked I don't have a product key or you've typed in the product key that is on the side of the case the next screen that shows up is license terms you're going to choose accept the license terms because you have no other choice you'll hit next now you're left with two available options here the first one is upgrade and the second is custom we don't want to upgrade we're trying to wipe this machine not upgrade it click custom if you look at this you will notice that there are usually going to be several partitions and what you see here will vary depending upon your specific machine but actually what you want to do is really really simple you want to delete everything now the USB thumb drive is not going to be in this list just the hard drives in the machine if there's only one drive what you'll see is drive 0 and then usually either two or three partitions if there's two drives go ahead and delete everything you just bought this there shouldn't be any data on it so we're going to click delete for the system reserved partition and partition number one we're going to click delete and so what we're left with is just one drive that says unalaq ated space the full-size there's nothing on here at this point we're going to hit next windows will set up the partitions all by itself we don't have to worry about it we're going to hit next and installing Windows at this point you're good to go everything that happens at this point is the same thing that would happen during a normal installation of Windows I'm going to trim this here because this will take a while and I will come back in just to show you it finishing and rebooting but in short this is essentially the same thing as any normal clean install of Windows when I click delete on those two partitions everything that was on this machine from its prior owner was gone you now have a completely clean install of Windows you have nothing further to worry about in terms of your data being safe when this finishes and reboots it's going to come up and ask you for your language and your timezone and it'll ask you to accept the agreement the terms again you'll then have to set up your user account either a Microsoft account or local account in Windows 10 and go through the normal setup process and then of course do the normal first boot and Windows Update and then make sure that your drivers are in place if you have a dedicated graphics card you'll need to download the drivers for it otherwise windows does a really good job of putting all the other drivers in place we'll be back in a minute when this is finished and we're back so it went through the entire copying and setting up windows process I have removed the USB thumb drive from the back of the machine it has rebooted and now it's going through the first Windows 10 setup process this is generally what you should see anytime you turn on a new machine and it's what you should see if whoever sold you their used or refurbished machine if they did it right it just takes a second because there is still a hard drive in here I will be replacing this with an SSD but I wanted to go ahead and show you what it would look like without changing anything in this machine getting devices ready because this is a clean install from Microsoft it has to do all the initial setup because it doesn't know what's in this machine so it is to scan through it and initialize everything it shouldn't take very long the screen went blank for a second it was probably initializing the video card it may also get initial critical updates I do have this machine connected to the Internet so it'll auto detect that and then check for any critical updates before it reboots it might it might reboot before we even get to the first screen depending upon getting ready thankfully you only have to do this once but what's your information and security work now if your machine would have reset by simply clicking on remove everything from the control panel in Windows then you wouldn't have to go through this but in the event that you do now you know how and we're back alright I had to trim that out because the getting ready took a lot longer than I'm used to because we're on a hard drive and then it actually rebooted and then came up to LexA get connected now you'll notice that I have several options this machine does have a Wi-Fi car but there's no need to use it because we are connected to a network I'm going to hit next get going fast this is the normal setting that you would see anytime you set up a machine I'm going to click use Express settings and then it comes up and says hi any machine you set up should say hi we're happy you're here and go through the normal Windows 10 setup process this will take time I will probably trim this again until we get up what did I say getting critical windows updates do not turn off your PC so it is downloading the latest critical updates over the network connection and then it will reboot and continue setting up so I'll go ahead and trim this and we'll be back when it's further along and we're back this message coming up saying who owns this PC is here because this is a Windows Windows 10 professional installation because this machine came with Windows 10 Pro so I own it we'll set it up with my Microsoft account although I won't in this case I'll skip this step to use a local account because this is a test machine tech deals just a moment it resets for the screen which it detected it's always just another moment isn't it now we'll set up your apps and this is the normal Windows 10 installation process you should see if we ever brought your machine whoever you bought your machine from did it correctly you would be seeing this anyway so in short one way or another you want to be seeing this process anytime you buy a computer new refurbished or used it doesn't matter this is the only way to ensure that your machine is genuinely yours and no one else has used it and put stuff on it that shouldn't be there lots of great features to get excited about actually I can agree without windows 10 has a number of nice things not everybody's a huge fan I am I quite like it I think it's an improvement over Windows 7 I tried using Windows 7 on a machine the other day and had suddenly felt quite old I've gotten very used to Windows 10 in the past year there's never a huge fan of 8 I didn't like to start screen 8.1 was an improvement but 10 definitely beats 8 in my opinion all right we could watch the rest of this but here's the thing at the end of this process it's the screen will turn black it'll say Lex start and then you're going to end up in Windows there's no need to show you anymore in short I've shown you the two ways that you can safely set up your machine with Windows 10 either by going into Start settings update Recovery reset this PC remove everything if that doesn't work for whatever reason you'll need a four gigabyte USB thumbdrive go to the link in the video description below or simply type in Microsoft media creation tool well actually that was pretty quick Microsoft media creation tool into Google go to Microsoft site download the tool make the USB thumb drive boot to that USB thumb drive delete all the partitions that are existing on the hard drive to wipe out everything that's on the machine do a complete clean install of Windows 10 and then you now have a safe installation you'll notice there's no icons on the desktop except the recycle bin when I bought this machine when I first turned it on there was a full column of icons of all kinds of programs they installed and of course now it says an update for Microsoft for onedrive is being installed which I see every time I turn on a new machine essentially this is now a new machine with a new installation of Windows 10 now before you start using it even though we just made this media creation tool you should still go to start well it's a hard drive it's still catching up start settings update and security check for updates there's almost certain to be an update even though look at that a full list of updates even though I made this what um actually in real time it was an hour ago I made this because there's been cuts in this video it won't be an hour long so let Windows Update run give the machinery boot and then you're good to go was this video helpful give it a like was it not don't remember to subscribe to my channel it's the big huge red button down there um if it's not right because you've already subscribed thank you very much but if it is red please click it because you will get updates to future performance reviews how-to guides Hardware reviews and all kinds of great tech related deals questions comments thoughts feedback suggestions those go in the comment section below the video description let me know what you think did you like this did you not like it was it helpful I certainly hope it was and as always if you want to support my channel if you find this video or any of the videos on my channel helpful check out the video description below it will have links to various sites that will help support me and if you want to see more videos using the links in the video description is the best way to make that happen thank you very much for watching and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Tech Deals

Views: 222,840

Keywords: Windows, Windows 10, 10, Clean Install, Windows 10 Install, Help Clean Install, How To Clean Install, How To, USB Thumb Drive, How to clean a used computer, used computer, reformat, reset pc, reset this pc, restore PC, what to do with a used computer, how to reinstall windows, reinstall, reinstall windows, wipe computer, format hard drive, format drive, how to make a USB thumb drive, windows 10 USB

Id: eHktdf3je44

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 19 2016