What would you set a new pc up with

donny-gal

Evening all

I am tonight setting up a new laptop for a friend, she has recently been widowed, and needs the lappy to keep in touch with her son and wife as they are travelling Europe and then the US over the next 12 months. Initially she will be using a wired connection, until she upgrades to wi-fi shortly.

The lappy is Windows 7, and I have put Avast on already. I am presuming the normal installation of Windows 7 will have switched the Windows Firewall. She will use it for Hotmail, Web Browsing, and Word, as well as storing her photos (yes she is backed up - I did it);) on her old desktop. What else do you recommend I install?

The lappy is the Medion i-3 from Sainsburys which was on the under £350 thread, and to be honest seems pretty good.:D

DG

closed

malwarebytes free version, and create recovery discs/windows recovery disc, and uninstall the bloat.

[Deleted User]

personally i`d ditch avast and use microsoft security essentials
also skype for free calls if travelling

donny-gal

Oh yes, Skype is wanted. Will stick with Avast, she has it on the old desktop so is used to it.

It comes with Recovery Disks for 32 and 64 bit and all the Applications.

Thanks DG

[Deleted User]

c cleaner is useful

GunJack

my normal suite is:-

avast or avira
mbam
ccleaner
glary utilities
defraggler

pretty good combo

scheming_gypsy

..............and create recovery discs/windows recovery disc, and uninstall the bloat.

Rather than creating recovery discs. Get everything installed, stick the hard drive into an external USB caddy and use something like http://clonezilla.org/ to create a clone of it.
If she has any problems with it you can just whip her data off and re-image it back to 'new'

Big_Ed

woodbine wrote: »

personally i`d ditch avast and use microsoft security essentials
also skype for free calls if travelling

+1 for MSE.

This maybe drastic but if she's only web browsing, using Office, skyping and looking at photo's, why not ditch Windows and go with Ubuntu (or some other Linux variant)? That way she won't have to install anything for spyware or viruses and it's less likely she'll run anything damaging (due to any system changes requiring a password).

somersethillbilly

I'd add sandboxie http://www.sandboxie.com/
and a hosts file http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

newDude

Big_Ed wrote: »

+1 for MSE.

This maybe drastic but if she's only web browsing, using Office, skyping and looking at photo's, why not ditch Windows and go with Ubuntu

Yes, very drastic Big_Ed, considering it's a new laptop WITH a OS. Different story if it came without Win7.

donny-gal

Sorry Big Ed do you really think an almost 70 year old, who has not spent their working life using PC's and have got used to using Windows could handle a completely new concept? The change to Windows 7 will be sufficient. Thanks for all your input. DG