I need some help!

[ChieriOnTop]

Hi guys! I'm not sure if this is even the right place to ask this but I'm somewhat desperate for answer. I recently bought this HP 8300 from my local thrift store, wasn't working, replaced the memory and all the sudden it worked. Cool right? I did however notice that whoever donated the computer did not take the hard drive out. Me being curious, I boot up the PC to see Windows 7 asking to start in normal mode because it seemed like it shut off randomly. I boot it up and get brought to a sign in screen which looks like a domain of some sort for a company I've never heard of, so I'm asking you guys for help.

What should I do here?
 

• Email the company and tell them about what I may have.
• Just format the drive and go on about my day.
• Just replace the hard drive with personal data with an empty SSD.
  
  I'm open to many suggestions, I'm not too worried that they want the data back since the hard drive was in there, I just want to do the right thing here incase maybe they didn't know...
  
   

[kb5zue]

Used company computers don't necessarily end up in a thrift store but more likely end up in a land-fill or a metals recycle facility.  Since you did find it in a thrift store, I would say the previous user more than likely may have been using the machine without the companies knowledge.

 

For my safety if it was me, I would just delete any/and/or/all partitions on the drive and then go ahead and use it the way I wanted.  Of course, there is always the idea of just taking the drive out and mailing it back to the company and letting them deal with it.  You never know, there may be pictures of the flying saucer crash from back in 1947 on the drive or maybe some pictures of Bigfoot.

 

Take care and good luck.

[BondiBlue]

Just format the drive and install a fresh operating system. I wouldn't want to use a random copy of Windows left on a machine by a previous owner, much less a copy that was clearly used as part of a domain setup. I'd also replace the hard drive with an SSD at this point. They're incredibly cheap, and it's a much better experience than booting from a mechanical drive. 

[ChieriOnTop]

1 hour ago, BondiBlue said:

Just format the drive and install a fresh operating system. I wouldn't want to use a random copy of Windows left on a machine by a previous owner, much less a copy that was clearly used as part of a domain setup. I'd also replace the hard drive with an SSD at this point. They're incredibly cheap, and it's a much better experience than booting from a mechanical drive. 

Oh yeah of course, I have multiple SSD's lying around, I just wasn't exactly sure what to do like I said before.

[djksm]

just throw it away and put in a new ssd

[BondiBlue]

13 hours ago, ChieriOnTop said:

Oh yeah of course, I have multiple SSD's lying around, I just wasn't exactly sure what to do like I said before.

If you want to make sure the data is gone from the original drive you can use something like DBAN to wipe it securely. That way nothing will happen to the data. It's up to you though, obviously the previous owners didn't care enough about data security.