Windows 10: Professional cleaning: what's involved?

My brother's PC is an Acer Aspire TC-105. It's a desktop that he bought from Best Buy. I have no idea if it has a UEFI BIOS; frankly, I'm not sure what that is myself since I don't keep up with all the details of Windows evolution. How do I determine if it is a UEFI BIOS?

 

How old is this PC?

 

He says it's "three or four years old".

 

looks to be UEFI and it originally had a Windows 8.1:

Product support

If you can successfully reinstall Windows 10, I’m confident you won’t need to install any drivers.

Also take note of this thread regarding booting:

Aspire TC-605 cant get it to boot from CD or Usb

 

I don't quite understand what lesson I should take from the link about the booting issue. The solution found by the OP seems to involves booting from a Linux CD rather than a Windows CD. Is this really relevant though? The computer has Windows 10 on it now, even if it started out as a Windows 8.1 machine. Isn't it going to be using the install media I create to put on a fresh copy of Windows 10 and bypass 8.1? Or is it going to install 8.1 and then upgrade it to 10?

 

I linked the that thread for general knowledge on booting from disc or USB. Seems to indicate that u you press F12 to enter boot menu.

You will not be installing 8.1. You’re installing 10 directly. Since the PC originally came with 8.1 and it’s got a few years age on it, I was just commenting on the likelihood that Windows 10 will install all the required drivers for you.

 

Okay, fair enough. I thought you were trying to warn me of a trouble spot in the installation that I wouldn't necessarily anticipate

 

Brought over from other thread you started.

DBAN may not like your hardware if it won’t boot. I was going to suggest the below as it would be the preferable method but for some reason, I thought it would be more complicated for you.

My brain doesn’t work right sometimes*Smile

 

What exactly does this mean: "Boot from a windows 10 installation drive"? In other words, am I right in believing that the DBAN CD is okay as it is (with just the files I've enumerated) and that the CD should be in the CD drive? Also, what should the boot sequence be in the BIOS? Do I want Windows Boot Manager first or the CD/DVD drive?

 

Installation drive is the disc or flash drive that you have the windows install media loaded on using the media creation tool.

Boot sequence is just the order the PC looks to boot from. If you set it to boot from a CD first, the PC will look for a bootable disc in the drive and boot from it if possible. If the disc isn’t bootable or there isn’t anything in the CD drive, it’ll skip and move on to whatever is next in line. You can have them in whatever order you prefer but if you’re going to install Windows, either the CD drive or USB boot needs to be moved up to be checked BEFORE the hard drive in the sequence.

According to the Acer forum thread discussed earlier, pressing F12 after power up will let you pick where to boot from without changing the boot order in the BIOS.

 

I set the boot order in the BIOS back to Windows Boot Mgr, followed by CD/DVD and saved the settings. Then I kept tapping F12 but it just booted into Windows again; I didn't get any menu that let me boot from the CD where DBAN is installed.

This is getting REALLY exasperating. I *think* I am following directions but for all the posts I've made, I *still* haven't got DBAN to erase the hard drive so that I can reinstall Windows, let alone gotten as far as actually starting the reinstall.

 

What did you create the Windows Installation media on A DVD disc or a flash drive?

Let's get you booted into the installation media and proceed from there. Forget DBAN at this time. If we can get you into the OS installation, we can erase the hard drive from there.


* I got these instructions from another Acer forum thread regarding a different model Acer. They may/may not help you*





UEFI

The Windows 8 desktop computer has a UEFI with a legacy BIOS mode. By default DVDs, CDs, and USB devices cannot be booted from, like most computers with a BIOS.
When a Live-CD was inserted into the DVD drive, and a Live-USB was inserted into a USB port they were ignored and the computer booted straight into Windows 8. The UEFI settings needed to be changed and the computer was rebooted.
The boot screen displayed:

• Press <Del> to enter setup

After pressing the Delete key the BIOS menu appeared. The DVD drive was shown as the “2nd Boot Device”. As a result, the boot priority order was altered and “CD&DVD” was configured to be the “1st Boot Device”. The computer was rebooted, and again the Live-DVD was ignored.
Further configurations were required.
Automatically Boot from CD/DVD

To get the Acer AXC-605-ER30 to boot first from the DVD drive, do the following:

• Press Delete to enter the BIOS setup
• Under the Authentication tab, disable Secure Boot
• Under the Boot Options tab, set Launch CSM to Always
• Under the Boot Options tab, set 1st Boot Device to CD&DVD
• Under the Boot Options tab, enable Boot Menu
• Save the changes and exit

The AXC-605-ER30 will now first attempt to boot from the DVD drive. Moreover, if the boot menu is accessed (F12), the DVD drive, hard drive, and USB drives (if detected), will appear as boot options.
With Compatibility Support Module (CSM) set to always, hard drives, CDs/DVDs and USB devices will boot in a legacy BIOS compatibility mode.

 

You're very right. No recent backup should be trusted.

 

When I owned my shop we would never use system restore, or recent backups. I also very seldom ever saw people backup there files, no matter how much we said backup. Also remember if you're going to start from scratch, once you get your drivers and anti virus installed, now is a good time to create a base image in case you ever need to start over again. And remember to verify your backups. Acronis is great backup software and can do many other things besides backing up.

 

Sorry for the delay in responding; I needed to take some time away from this. In answer to your question about creating the installation media, I haven't even started that yet. I had planned to get the DBAN going first, then create the media while DBAN did its thing, which I understand might be many hours. But if you'd saying to make the media first then I'll go work on that. I haven't read the tutorial for that yet but I'll do that and then either proceed to create the media or, more likely, post here again with any question that arise as I read the tutorial. I'll stay in this thread to avoid confusing things further.