Quote from: LongTimeAgo on Today at 05:11:12 AM

I have an old gaming laptop that I purchased used in early 2011. I reformatted the hard drive at least once with windows, used it for maybe a year, and its been dormant since 2012. The chances are slim to none, however, before I chuck the laptop I thought it would be a good idea to at least see if there may have been a bitcoin wallet on the hard drive. Is there any easy way of doing this? Or totally pointless.

This is silly. It's almost certainly pointless and futile. This is akin to buying a random plot of land and spending a lot of time and effort digging it all up in the hope that you might find some long-lost buried treasure. If you like the phantasy idea of searching for buried treasure that probably isn't going to be there then go ahead but we all know this is going to be a waste of time. Lets say in some bizarre circumstance you do actually manage to restore the drive to it's previous state, the chances of a bitcoin wallet being there are slim to none. And even if you found one then what if you can't crack the password, which you won't be able to if it's a very strong one. And then maybe you do manage to crack the password... What's to say the coins haven't already been spent or there was never any money on there in the first place.