SOLVED Giving an old PC away.

[Tim Locke]

I have an old machine that received the free W10 update and has been kept uptodate ever since, now running 14393.187. It says it is activated with a digital licence.
I am going to give this machine away to someone and I intend to do a complete reset. I can do this from within windows or I can do this from a freshly downloaded Windows loaded onto a USb via the 'tool'

I am confident that the reset will work My question is: Will either or both remove all the accounts on the machine AND preserve the activation... has to completely remove the accounts and stay activated. The new owner will be generating a MS account for themselves and using it to log on.

The Article above has a screen shot suggesting that the full 'keep nothing' will remove accounts and various posts here and MS support notes say that once a MOBO has been activated it stays that way. Neither I nor the recipient of the machine wishes to have to buy a new W10 licence.

 

[Regedit32]

Hi Tim,

Yes if you click the Get Started button beneath Reset this PC the next window has two options.

The second option Remove Everything will remove personal files, apps, settings and accounts.

From there there is another window with a couple of options: one is a fast clean, and the second option is a thorough clean which can take a few hours depending on your computer specs. The second option here is best in my opinion if you are giving this computer to someone else.

 

[Tim Locke]

Thank you. I knew that most stuff would be gone but I wasn't sure about accounts. I presumed that the activation would stay as the only changes the PC has had are adding more memory and a video card

 

[Tim Locke]

So I did the reset. I told it to get rid of everything and clean the disks. After 1/2 hour it had done some 'getting things ready' Got to 8% and while I was out of the room for a moment came up and said " putting things back" and did not do the reset.

To me the MOST ANNOYING thing about that is that it didn't just stop with afew lines of text giving the reason. Grrrrrrr,. SO I downloaded the OS and am now reloading it.

 

[Regedit32]

Yikes that is annoying.

I would stick a Windows 10 disk in, boot to that; choose Repair option, then from there go to do a clean reset - best way to avoid annoying third party junk or even Windows junk that may be interfering with the reset process.

Failing that a clean install with the Windows 10 ISO.

 

[Tim Locke]

So. I had a fresh USB of W10 made just a few days ago. So I tried that running setup from within W10 and it loaded ok. SILLY ME!!!!! i tried to add a new MS account for my friend and got the password wrong. Of course I could not get to her nor her email to do a reset. So I could not get on. Thoroughly stuck. This old machine wont boot from USB so I made a DVD. Tried that and it decided it would not install. Now I am trying my own real bought from MS DVD which if it works I'll continue with no MS account set up and of course have to do the 1607 update again. Now this disc of mine is OEM, as I bought it for a new machine but I am loading it on a machine already registered...I guess I will see what happens...although it already says it is activated. good! So it has a pile of updates I'll let those run and see if it comes up with the Anniversary update later.

 

[Tim Locke]

It did a couple of hours of updates( this is a slow machine) and then I got the anni update from MS site and it all works cleanly.
The machine has a D: drive full of stuff ( used to be the original Vista/W7 boot drive) Easy cleanup. Deelete all the partitions in Disk manager , make a new one and format it!