What can I do?
 

I just bought a used lap top, and there is a lot of crap on the hard drive. Is there any thing I can do to get it removed?

What manufacturer? Dell, Gateway etc?

HP

XP, Vista, Win 7?

win7

Look in the Start menu for something called HP Recovery Manager. You may be able to do a complete disk wipe and start from the original installation. If it's not there, you may be able to start it by rebooting and hitting F11 when the system is starting up.

Thanks Tony. I will now tell my tale, my Mac died $585.00 is too much so we went to Pawn America and bought a laptop. they already did that. When I downloaded Picasa and told it to import It found 1000 or better items.
Does this mean that to get rid of all this stuff I would have to replace the hard drive?

these items, are they pictures the previous owner put on the machine? Picassa is just a photo viewing software, isn't it? Can't you just manually delete them? They're probably in some fairly organized location.

They claim they did that but if you found old pics from the old user, they didn't do that.

Does the machine have a Windows 7 product key still on it?

I would recommend downloading a Windows 7 Home Premium ISO and reinstalling if it does. You don't know what you got from the previous owner, and if it came from a pawn shop, you may not want to.

Windows 7 Home Premium download link: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...emium-download