![]() ![]() With over a decade of writing experience in the field of technology, Chris has written for a variety of publications including The New York Times, Reader's Digest, IDG's PCWorld, Digital Trends, and MakeUseOf. Chris has personally written over 2,000 articles that have been read more than one billion times-and that's just here at How-To Geek. Breaking into them would require an encryption backdoor, a supercomputer, or several trillion years of free time to spend brute-forcing the Bitlocker Recovery Key on an RTX 4090.Ĭhris Hoffman is the former Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. Modern encryption schemes are quite robust, and while files might be recoverable, they're going to be unreadable. If your drive was encrypted, you don't need to worry as much about cleaning the data, regardless of whether it was an SSD or an HDD. SSDs present much less of a security risk than older HDDs because of TRIM - files that you delete are typically removed from the SSD immediately, or at worst removed via a scheduled retrim. That means whoever winds up with your computer could conceivably recover pictures, videos, passwords, and other files if you're not careful! Without that special precaution, it is easy to recover "deleted" data from an HDD. The clean function will overwrite the existing data on the drive to make it unrecoverable. If you're wiping conventional mechanical hard drives and you're going to be selling or giving away your computer, and you were not using any kind of drive encryption, you should absolutely use the cleaning function. If your computer came with Windows pre-installed, you may also see a third option, "Restore Factory Settings." This will restore the original version that came with your PC - so if your computer came with Windows 10, and you upgraded to Windows 11, it will reset back to Windows 11. Any problems caused by third-party software, system file corruption, system settings changes, or malware should be fixed by resetting your PC. However, all your installed programs and settings will be erased. You can choose whether you want to keep your personal files or erase them. If you installed Windows 10 or Windows 11 yourself, it will be a fresh Windows system without any additional software. By default, all manufacturer-installed software and drivers that came with the PC will be reinstalled, though you can force it to install a clean version of Windows. If you purchased a PC and it came with Windows 10 or Windows 11 installed, your PC will be in the same state you received it in. When you use the "Reset this PC" feature in Windows, Windows resets itself to its factory default state. ![]()
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