micky wrote:
Hi, I bought 2 weeks ago a Dell Latitude E4300, a small laptop, Win7,
64-bit.

It had a fingerprint sensor and an ID card sensor. They don't have
their software anymore, because win7 was re-installed, but that implies
to me the computer was used in a corporate or government environment.

(It also had IIUC the ability to do a special fast boot that would
enable it only to get email. It used separate boot files that were hard
coded somewhere iiuc, but I'm sure that also required software I don't
have now. That's okay because I'm not some executive who has to read
his email every 20 minutes. And in practice I would never turn the
computer on only to get email. Even if I only planned that, the email
might make me want to check the web for something.)

I probably have lots of questions, but this is the first one.

I went to dell support, entered the tag number, and ran the driver
checkup and it listed 9 drivers to be updated!!!

Gosh that's hard to believe.

Video, Chipset, Video Graphics, Audio, Bios, Mouse/Keyboard, Network,
Network Wireless, Serial ATA.

That's almost everything. (What's left?) Even though the thing seems to
be working fine now. Should I install them one at a time or all at
once?

It says "Auto Installation not available. Please try again later or
manually download nad install individual updates." Is this one of
those times when later will never come? Or should I wait?

This would imply the previous owner never updated drivers at all, and
that seems surprising in a corporate environment. Or not??

Thanks.

A corporate environment, would likely not return a lease machine
(three year lease) with the company "internal OS image" on it.

Once a machine comes off lease, a refurbisher may get their hands
on it (Joy Systems). And there's a refurbisher OS placed on it.

This sounds like a SOHO deal, where it could have been a smaller
business, that bought from Dell. And really, it would be an open
question as to how much attention it received. Would the owner
have used "factory restore" before selling or giving it away ?
Who can say. If they were careless, running a copy of Photorec
or Recuva over it, might dig up things better left buried.

Here's a (post) review of the thing you bought. I gather from this,
it's a Vista era machine.

http://www.digitalrig.com/hardware/d...-months-later/

If the previous owner did Factory Restore, then it's quite possible
the restored drivers are not current. And that would be why they're
all listed as needing updates. Nobody would waste the time, bringing
such a machine up-to-date on drivers. Only if they were using it,
would they do that.

If you wanted to do forensics on the disk (Photorec or Recuva),
you'd clone the disk with "dd" or similar, and grab every sector.
And then you can take your time scanning the clone for "gems". In
normal usage, the disk white space will get overwritten by
normal activities, and that will tend to eat away at any
of the previous owners files still sitting on the disk hidden.

When you delete a file, just a single byte is flipped in the
$MFT, invalidating it, but the clusters with the data are
still sitting there. Overwriting large files, on a delete,
would take too long, and people would hate that if that's how
Microsoft had implemented it. And this is why "undelete" utilities
exist - they look for that flipped byte value, compare the clusters
in the entry to see if they conflict with current files, and then
the utility can tell you whether "Good" or "Poor" quality undelete
is possible. "Good" quality, means the clusters listed for the
(hidden) file, do not conflict with any other clusters currently
in usage.

*******

If you want to properly prepare a machine for sale, it takes
a lot of work to make it forensically clean... The Factory Restore
isn't good enough by itself, requiring you to dream up your
own workflow to do it. (On your technician machine "Diskpart"
"Clean All", then restore the factory partition using Macrium
and your backup of the hard drive, move the drive back to the laptop,
boot, and run Factory Restore. It should have a clean background
then. The "Clean All" gives you a clean place to start building
the disk up again.)

Paul