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Removing MS 365 and OneDrive subscription from ONE PC

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Clariman
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Removing MS 365 and OneDrive subscription from ONE PC

#446599

Postby Clariman » September 30th, 2021, 2:03 pm

I have an old laptop which I logged into my MS 365 account from, so it has all the contents of my One Drive. However, this is a spare PC which I want to give to a friend. How do I safely remove MS 365, One Drive and any data of mine without doing a factory reset? There is no other data of mine, apart from the One Drive data.

If the best way is a factory reset, how can I do that without it downgrading from Win 10 to Win 7 - the latter being what originally came with the PC?

Most important is that I only remove OneDrive from this PC and not unsubscribe to it more generally!

Thanks
C

Clariman
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Re: Removing MS 365 and OneDrive subscription from ONE PC

#446604

Postby Clariman » September 30th, 2021, 2:12 pm

I've just taken a punt on Settings/Recovery/Reset this PC - remove data and settings

Fingers crossed :o :?

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Re: Removing MS 365 and OneDrive subscription from ONE PC

#446616

Postby Adamski » September 30th, 2021, 2:41 pm

Clariman wrote:I've just taken a punt on Settings/Recovery/Reset this PC - remove data and settings

Fingers crossed :o :?


Sounds good. But after done that on new pc log onto Microsoft account, through settings or through your browser.

Then look up devices using your MS account. If old still on there delete old device off.

Clariman
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Re: Removing MS 365 and OneDrive subscription from ONE PC

#446624

Postby Clariman » September 30th, 2021, 3:01 pm

Adamski wrote:
Clariman wrote:I've just taken a punt on Settings/Recovery/Reset this PC - remove data and settings

Fingers crossed :o :?


Sounds good. But after done that on new pc log onto Microsoft account, through settings or through your browser.

Then look up devices using your MS account. If old still on there delete old device off.

Perfect thanks. That's just what I needed to know :)

All looks good. It is now installing a Cumulative Update 20H2 which I vaguely recall caused some issues on a PC before, but we'll see :?

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Re: Removing MS 365 and OneDrive subscription from ONE PC

#446819

Postby servodude » October 1st, 2021, 1:58 am

Clariman wrote:
Adamski wrote:
Clariman wrote:I've just taken a punt on Settings/Recovery/Reset this PC - remove data and settings

Fingers crossed :o :?


Sounds good. But after done that on new pc log onto Microsoft account, through settings or through your browser.

Then look up devices using your MS account. If old still on there delete old device off.

Perfect thanks. That's just what I needed to know :)

All looks good. It is now installing a Cumulative Update 20H2 which I vaguely recall caused some issues on a PC before, but we'll see :?


If anything does go wrong; I've found in the past the fastest way to get a clean functional win10 machine is to create install media on an up to date one and use that for a fresh install
- it avoids the need for the catch up updates and doesn't add any crud that the machine shipped with (which might be re-installed on a reset/restore)

- sd

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Re: Removing MS 365 and OneDrive subscription from ONE PC

#446831

Postby Midsmartin » October 1st, 2021, 7:27 am

If there was personal data in it, someone could run data recovery software and recover the stuff you thought you'd deleted, even deleted a long time ago. If there is a solid state drive, this sort of recovery is much harder.

If you are ok with that, what I would do is create a new windows user account, make it an admin, log in to it, and completely delete your user account.

Then, you could install and run a program such as Eraser, set to clean up the unused space, which would severely reduce the chance of anyone undeleting anything.

Midsmartin
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Re: Removing MS 365 and OneDrive subscription from ONE PC

#446852

Postby Midsmartin » October 1st, 2021, 8:54 am

Even if you do as I suggested, there are still cases where personal data might be left on the computer. Imagine that at some point you'd saved a copy of your cv, or tax return in a folder called c:\temp or c:\mytaxreturns, and forgotten about it. These files would still be present. And in this case only that factory reset would catch all these things you'd forgotten about. It all depends how much private data there is on it, and how much you trust the person you're giving it to (but what will they do with it when they've finished with it?).

Windows 10 makes the factory reset option very easy. Just click the "start" menu button, and type in the word "reset". The top search result will be "reset this pc". There are two options: 1) reset and keep your data files or 2)reset and remove all your data files. That's it.. a few clicks and it's done.

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Re: Removing MS 365 and OneDrive subscription from ONE PC

#446853

Postby chas49 » October 1st, 2021, 8:59 am

Your approach will have removed the data so just adding this as an alternative for anyone else with a similar requirement:

If you go to OneDrive settings on the machine you want to delink), and unlink the PC (full instructions here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/off ... fb09f944b0), then delete the local files, and uninstall the OneDrive application you will have removed your data.


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