Selling HP Pavilion 27-a010 All-In-One & need to do a factory reset. Does Windows 10 stay installed

[Libba56]

I am selling my Pavilion 27-a010 All-In-One.  I need to know how to do a factory reset so that all of my personal info/apps etc are removed from the desktop.  I also need to know if the current version of Windows 10 will remain installed so the new user can turn on the computer like it was just out of the box.

[Grzwacz]

Greetings,

Welcome to the forum.

I am not a HP employee.

You have some options available to reset your PC back to factory settings.

Method:

1-Use the HP Recovery partition on the primary HDD.

Restart your PC. Tap "F11".

Follow the prompts to reinstall the factory image.

2-Purchase Windows 10 HP Recovery media for your PC at this HP Support site (Link) if the recovery partition method fails. You have a Touch PC, is this correct?

3-Install windows 10 clean by creating W10 installation media using this Microsoft site (Link). This method is not quite back to factory settings. Some HP software will be missing. You may also have a different version of Windows 10.

The above methods don't cleanse the HDD. This means your personal data may be recoverable if one wants to find the previous bytes not over written by a format and new operating system installation.

It is best to destroy (keep) the current HDD. Install a new drive. Then reinstall the operating system on the new drive using methods two or three.

The next best option is to wipe the existing OS disk (Link) before reinstalling the operating system on this disk. You may have to pull the HDD and connect it to a different PC to wipe it. This depends on what disk wiping software you use.

Don't know how far you want to go with this.

Regards