It’s been a long time but It finally happened, I’ve been compromised. Like an idiot I reused passwords and they got into most of my accounts. I’ve changed 300 different passwords and recovered all except one account, my Facebook, which I’m being told is unlikely I’ll ever get into again.

This is probably from a data breach, I’m in a few, however, I still want to do a wipe of my PC, but it’s been a few years and I don’t remember the best practices.

This is a long time coming though because as well as simply possibly being compromised my PC has been experiencing a myriad of errors and annoyances, such as random entire system stutters, apps crashing out of nowhere and general performance slowdown.

Luckily I’ve got about 7 drives all holding various things, but the entire OS is on the tiny NVME C drive, as well as program installations. IIRC I can factory reset without losing data on the other drives but this one will probably be wiped yes? Is this enough for security though? I would imagine most malicious files would be completely removed by reinstalling the OS but I want to make sure no other avenues exist.

Also what is best practices this day and age to do a clean reset? Thanks guys

  • Save what you want on a different drive or in the documents folder. All the personal user folders and anything on drives other than where windows is installed are the only things that, by default, do not get erased when you reinstall Windows.