Effects of formatting a laptop

If I format my laptop will software packages such as Microsoft Office (Microsoft Word, Power Point, etc.) be deleted? If so can they be recovered after deletion?

Solution 1:

In the simplest terms, if you format your laptop's hard drive you will erase all the contents of that drive and your drive will be empty. All your programs and data will be gone. Will they be recoverable? Again, in the simplest terms, no, they cant be recovered.

Now to get more advanced. Technically speaking, a standard format of a drive does not erase any of your data and programs. It deletes the information that where operating system says it stored that data is on the drive. All of your programs and data are still sitting right where they were before you formatted them. So, technically, it is possible to recover everything, but this is not a trivial task.

There is a lot more to formatting and data recovery that can be discussed, but I believe that would be outside the scope of your question. And speaking of your question, you left out a lot of information from your question, perhaps you should explain why you want to format your drive.

Solution 2:

If I format my laptop will software packages such as Microsoft Office (Microsoft Word, Power Point, etc.) be deleted?

Yes.

If so can they be recovered after deletion?

No.

Unless you have an old-style hard drive that doesn't erase things you delete. But even then, it's tough to recover the data stored in the registry. It's hard enough that I'd advise you to buy a new copy of Office rather than attempt recovery.

I apologize that this answer conflicts with the 4 existing answers, but many technical users don't yet understand how SSDs reclaim sectors using TRIM, GC, and when formatted. Undelete is a thing of the past.