Suspicious about Laptop

[jayho]

Posting here as I've previously seen useful advice on this subject.

My ex, father of my children, and I have an extremely acrimonious relationship, he has never paid child support, does not have regular contact with the children and does not contribute to any of their costs. Teenagers and we've been divorced 14 years.

Suddenly, he has bought youngest a laptop. it looks new but there's a suspicious bit of re-sealing tape on the box and 'Grade B' scored out on the label which I think means re-furbished. When we started it up we had to install a new account, New email etc but - is there anyway it could have spyware or trackers installed? If so, how do I find out?

He's got form, gave same child a phone but constantly followed and monitored him on it and child could not do anything without ex's permission. So he stopped using it.

Thanks in advance.

It could easily have unwanted stuff on it. Try contacting a local PC repair place and ask them if they could reset it.

Not necessarily anything wrong with a refurbished machine but if your not sure of him have the hard drive cleaned and reset.

You can reset to factory settings yourself, I managed with a refurbed dell and didn't need the disks, just found out how on Google. Is it Windows 10?

thanks both, haven't really looked TBH, been at work all day. I'll have a dig around the settings later. all son has done so far is load up You Tube and watch nonsense 😂

I don't know technically how you could have it set up with trackers when it presents as reset to factory settings with no account. It might be possible but it would require excellent tech knowledge.

That's what I was hoping to hear although he is an it specialist

Cover up the camera if it has one.
same if it has a microphone.

only use it for harmless stuff.
dont do any transactions on it.

Don't forget to download some decent antivirus software.

thanks, I was thinking that about camera, plus DS came down excited yesterday to say it has voice recognition.

usage is currently being monitored through his brother; 'have you logged on?' 'what sites have you accessed?' awful for both of them and causes so much tension. If I tell brother to stop he gets it in the neck from ex. We set up a new email and password for log on so I think as long as I make sure DS doesn't share details with his brother he'll be secure.

Hate having to be so suspicious