Before doing the steps below make sure you have all your data backed up on an external source i.e. thumb drive, external hard drive, or cloud storage. This process will delete all data and user accounts. When completed your laptop will be like it was out of the box from Dell. We recommend using this method to “refresh” you laptop to give it a longer life after graduation.

1. Make sure it is plugged into power
2. Now, click on the Start menu and type “Reset This PC” Click Enter
3. Click on Get Started
4. Next, click on Remove Everything
5. Click on Change Settings
6. Click on the toggle so that it says On. It should say “Remove files and clean the drive.” Click Confirm
7. Check that it says “Remove files and clean the drive.” Click Next, then click Reset

Once it reaches 100% you will see a black screen saying “A configuration change was requested to clear this computers TPM” you want to press F12 to clear the TPM Your laptop will now be ready to setup. It will walk you through creating a new account.

Once the reset process is complete you will need to setup your system, simply follow the onscreen instructions. If you are signing in with a Microsoft account that account will be used via Microsoft support for password recovery. If you don’t have a Microsoft account you want to use, we recommend making a secondary local administrator account as a backup in case you forget the password for your primary account. You can do this by doing the following:

1. Click Start , then type “users“.

2. Expand the Local Users and Groups section.

3. Select Users, and then Action at the top of the window, and click New User.

4. Create username and password for the account and click Create.

5. Click on Groups on the left in the Computer Management window, then double click Administrators.

6. On the next window click Add, type in the name of the new account you just made and click Okay.