Formatting Or Reset Factory

[trixilator]

I have relatively new W10 laptop I'd like to pass on to young relative, Do I reset to factory
settings or do I need to format the hard drive so he can start off fresh with none of my stuff
on it? Either way - is it simple task?
Many thanks

[derek-33]

or just delete your documents photos etc stuff that's personal leave the rest on dont think your nephew will scour your hard drive for deleted stuff

[Buenchico]

You don't need to do either. Simply delete all your personal files (such as documents and pictures) - after you've copied them to your new computer first, obviously!

Next, uninstall any software that you don't want to leave on the laptop (such as banking software or a program that backs up your data to the cloud).

After that, delete all of your browser's bookmarks and clear its cache and cookies. (Instructions available on request; please say which browser you use).

If you've got any other software that you might have 'personalised' in some way, remove that personalisation.

Then ( and here's the important bit!) wipe the free space on the drive, rendering all your deleted files unrecoverable. You've got a choice of two ways of doing that. You can either use the 'cipher' command which is built into Windows or use CCleaner. Instructions here:
https://www.groovypost.com/howto/securely-wipe-free-space-windows-pc/

I most definitely would NOT format the hard drive, as that would leave you needing reinstall Windows (and, once you'd done that, the laptop would probably only work at a crawl for ages while it spent weeks reinstalling all of the Windows updates). Resetting the laptop to its 'out of the box' state would be a lot easier but it might still leave your files accessible by file recovery software (or, depending upon how the reset function works, even still openly accessible).

[Old_Geezer]

Your young relative may be more tech savvy than many. He might get curious. Maybe run an application that scrubs unused disk areas clean after you've deleted private stuff ? No, not got any in mind though, been ages since I last wanted to scrub the disk.

[Old_Geezer]

Ah, knew I ought not have stopped for late lunch half way through writing :-O