need to delete all programs and folders of the past owner of this p.ctried add & remove programs?

Answer 1

Format.

Answer 2

Add-Remove Programs works as advertised. It cleans out the registry while it's at it.. The "uninstall.exe" file in your program folder doesn't do this. The first thing to do is delete the "user profile" of "past owner". Tip: Sometimes Add-Remove Programs commands are "intercepted" by the uninstall.exe file,
which wants to keep keys open in your registry. To avoid this,
first delete the programs one at a time and then when you use Add-Remove (if they are still listed) it will tell you that it's gone already, do you want to remove from this list? Hit yes. These are not difficult time consuming tasks. You should only reinstall Windows as a last resort, or if you are upgrading to a better system. In any case, make sure you don't get rid of any programs or files you might want to keep. This can save you alot of time and money if you later find out you should have kept
them. Good software isn't cheap!

Answer 3

the quickest and best way to make sure that all the programs and files of the previous owner are gone is to reinstall windows if you have the recovery cd or the windows OS disc. other that that you will have to do it manually one by one using add and remove programs and clicking on the programs themselves and look for an unintall application. because if you just delete them yourself without uninstalling them they will still be in the registry and that's another can of worms.

good luck

Answer 4

If you have O/S discs, just reformat the harddrive. Or do a destructive recovery. If you don't have any Operating System discs, and it's an HP, Compaq, or Acer, you can run the recovery console from it most of the time without the discs, and do it that way. Either way though if programs aren't uninstalling, either they are malware, or your O/S just may have some corruptions, in which it needs a reformat anyways.

Answer 5

if you have a windows disk go to DOS mode and type c:\format