can I clean PC to sell without my original recovery disk?

I need to get my private info off my HP Pavilion zv6130us because I am selling it, but I cannot find the recovery disk that came with it a year ago. ARRRGH! I do have XP Pro disks. What can I do? I have a lot of programs to take off of there, but wanted to leave some freeware on there for the person I'm selling it to. I manually copied all (I hope) my documents off of there, but am having trouble removing programs. Does anybody know a better way I can do this? I could spend a few dollars if there is a cleanup program I should buy. I have spent many hours trying to do this before I got smart enough to ask for your help.

 

So what is the ideal course of action here? Simply removing programs? Can you not do that with Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel?

Or do you want to go a step further, and format, wiping everything? A clean installation of Windows is what I would be happiest with as your customer... you can always reinstall the freeware.

 

If you don't have the system discs that were shipped with PC, you can contact HP and they'll ship the CD's to you for free (you pay shipping and handling). I've done this before for a friend in your exact situation; we went to hp.com, and in the driver page there was the option to order the system recovery software. After entering his name and the PC's serial number, we gave 'em a credit card number to cover S&H, and 3 days later we had the CD's

hd2k

 

Re: Ordering disks from HP

RAM, if you order your disks from HP, make sure you order by credit card and absolutely pay the extra $15 for over-night shipping!
I had to order disks from HP and my cards were maxed, so I had to pay by money order, and I couldn't afford the extra $15 for over-night shipping. Long story short, I got my recovery disks ELEVEN :*** WEEKS LATER!

Think I'm still a little bitter ? :boxing