How do I prepare to send my laptop to HP for repair?

[MusicByRich]

I'm about to ship my laptop to HP for repair.  What steps should I take to protect my personal data, installed apps, et al?

Thank you,

~Rich

[WAWood]

@MusicByRich 

In truth, there is NOTHING you can do to protect or secure that information.  Once HP has the laptop, they can get FULL ACCESS to it and to anything on it.

I wrote an article about this here:  https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebooks-Knowledge-Base/Preparing-a-used-HP-notebook-for-resale/ta-p/...

That addresses resale, but the same issues apply to sending a laptop off for repair.

You should also know that you can NOT save off the apps in a form that you can use to reinstall them. Period.

I would suggest that you read the information below about making an Image Backup to external media.  HP is most likely going to replace the drive, or reimage it -- and in either case, you will lose everything on it in the process.  Having an external backup will give you something to restore the PC FROM when you get it back.

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I personally prefer to use third-party Backup solutions as they tend to be both more flexible and more reliable than any built-in solutions.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive or USB stick
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 15 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore.

NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the external drive or USB stick in only a few minutes.