Windows 10 setup and security advice

I finally talked a sister into giving up her old Dell PC with Vista, so naturally as punishment next week I have to go down and unpack her new Dell PC with Win 10 Home and transfer all of her files over. I'm still on Win 7 Ultimate myself so I've never used Win 10 and I need some advice. First, my understanding is that you can turn off the tablet look and get a traditional desktop instead. Is that easy to find, or is there some secret incantation I need to know to find a hidden button or menu or control panel? She has DSL with the usual modem/router/wifi box with all of the factory (or Southern Bell) defaults and the PC will be plugged directly in so do I need to have the internal wifi in the new PC turned on? My assumption is that there is no need for a wifi connection directly to the PC. Same question about bluetooth on the PC. She has a tablet and IPhone but they use wifi to get to the internet so that just goes to the dsl, no need to involve the PC, right? Any other reasons I need them on in the PC? Are there any security or other settings in Win 10 that I need to check or change? I assume that it will come with one admin user set up with full privileges and that I should create a normal, non-admin, user for her to use. How about antivirus software? I've been using Kaspersky on my machine, with free cccleaner and malwarebytes for occasional checks and cleanup, plus windows defender. With all of the "Russian hacking" news and accusations about Kaspersky I don't know if I will renew next year or switch for myself, and I don't know what to recommend for her.

So, if anyone (yes, I'm thinking of you, Jeff L :-) :-), please) has any advice I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance.

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Regards, 
Carl Ijames
Reply to
Carl
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Download a free win10 virtual machine image from Microsoft and try it yourself.

formatting link

There's plenty of how-to's on you-tube.

tablet phone:

file sharing?

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     ?
Reply to
Jasen Betts
  1. My advice would have been Win 7 Pro
  2. Tell her to save everything every 2 minutes because at any time it will download an update and make it unusable for up to overnight and might f*ck it up.

If you're going to throw that Vista PC out I'll take it and upgrade to XP Pro Corp. (that version has quite a bit that most people don't know about)

Reply to
jurb6006

That went out with Windows 8.1, Win10 boots to a desktop with start button.

The start menu is organised differently though. FWIW I use:

Your basic assumptions are good. The system should boot up with DHCP enabled. As another reply mentioned maybe wireless for file-sharing, although if the phone & tablet are apple devices there's usually no files to share or they're on the cloud and accessible via a web account interface.

Otherwise leave all the wireless off.

This you'll need to research for yourself if you want more detail - even the Administrator account can be restricted when it comes to altering parts of the OS etc. The default account should be the only one required and there's always UAC (User Account Control) which interrupts every time something wants to make a change (mine's turned off).

Windows Defender is deprecated for Win10 and is replaced by 'Security Center'. Additional AV doesn't hurt. Make sure the OS updated with the latest security patches (if nothing else). I also use MwB, CCleaner, and corporate rules force Sophos onto us...

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Cheers, 

Chris.
Reply to
Chris

That went out with Windows 8.1, Win10 boots to a desktop with start button.

The start menu is organised differently though. FWIW I use:

Your basic assumptions are good. The system should boot up with DHCP enabled. As another reply mentioned maybe wireless for file-sharing, although if the phone & tablet are apple devices there's usually no files to share or they're on the cloud and accessible via a web account interface.

Otherwise leave all the wireless off.

This you'll need to research for yourself if you want more detail - even the Administrator account can be restricted when it comes to altering parts of the OS etc. The default account should be the only one required and there's always UAC (User Account Control) which interrupts every time something wants to make a change (mine's turned off).

Windows Defender is deprecated for Win10 and is replaced by 'Security Center'. Additional AV doesn't hurt. Make sure the OS updated with the latest security patches (if nothing else). I also use MwB, CCleaner, and corporate rules force Sophos onto us...

Cheers,

Chris. ===============================================================

Thanks, Chris, glad to hear about the start button and no need for a second user. No one does any wireless file sharing with her current machine, she just plugs her phone in every couple of years when it fill up with pictures to download them for more space. She mostly does email (still uses the AOL interface, sigh :-)) and web surfing, plus a little Word and Excel, and the grandkids play web based games when they visit. I'm going to show her LibreOffice so she won't have to pay to upgrade her ancient Microsoft Office bundle. It sounds like it will be even easier than I hoped.

Last question, does Win 10 still insist on doing updates when it wants to or is there a way to control the scheduling?

--
Regards, 
Carl Ijames
Reply to
Carl

The update scheduling options as good as (or better) than what was available since XP which could be set to install updates & reboot immediately too, I don't know why ppl harp on about Win10 being so bad in this regard.

An example: You can define 'active hours'; a time interval during which it's won't automatically restart, and ask first if it wants to outside of those hours.

You can defer updates between 1 & 365 days.

And so on...

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Cheers, 

Chris.
Reply to
Chris

Snip

Same here from an 'oldy' person. Been on XP and Win 7 and had to switch the wife's PC to a WIN 10.... the advice from PC World was to 'say no to everything' during the installation process and then tweak it up afterwards. Worked fine for me. The first time I did it, prior to this advice, it was a nightmare, just saying yes to everything....so I had to go back for advice and I'm quite tech savvy.... WIN 10 tries to be too clever for it's own good IMO. There is also an 'app' that emulates the desktop of the familiar Win7 but I have n experience of that . My wife is happy with her setup so I'm reluctant to 'fiddle' less I get an ear bashing ! Hope that helps.

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Reply to
TTman

Of course. You can control that in the setup to have it tell you when an update is available and you select when to install it.

If nothing else, this is so you don't download 100's of MB on a pay by the MB connection I expect.

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

Add a second user. There is always a risk that something - OS, apps, user - will screw up and mess up user settings to the point of being unable to log in or unable to do much after logging in. I've seen it happen a few times over the years (I have little Win10 experience, however). At the very least, make a user for yourself with administrative privileges and a password that you don't share with the main user. Then you stand a better chance of being able to fix things when everything goes bananas. (And do /not/ turn on any sort of encryption on files unless you are on the NSA/CIA short-list. And if you are on their lists, don't use Windows at all.)

Unless you have an odd router setup, sharing (if you want it) should work with the PC connected to the router by Ethernet and other devices connected by Wifi.

Make sure you install Chrome, Firefox or both - and remove all icons and start menus for MS browsers. Neither Chrome nor Firefox are entirely secure, but they are much less insecure. Consider setting the router to use OpenDNS rather than the ISP's DNS server, to keep everyone a bit safer. And install AdBlock.

LibreOffice is, IMHO, better than MS Office in most respects. I'd choose LibreOffice even if it cost money and MS Office was free.

If you want your system to be stable, the best idea is to turn off updates. I have often seen Windows updates screw up systems and break programs that were working fine before. Almost all the "security" updates are nonsense - they are either totally irrelevant to a home user, no problem when you avoid MS's browsers, or a hidden way to give MS more control of your system "to keep it safe".

Even better, given the expected use of the system, is to drop Windows entirely. Install Linux Mint instead, and after the brief confusion of wondering where your anti-virus and anti-malware programs are and why you have all this software for free, you'll find life much easier.

Reply to
David Brown

Thaere is an option to tick relating to 'metered' internet connections for that exact reason...

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Reply to
TTman

Thank you all for the advice. It sounds like it won't be nearly as bad as the early Internet screaming made it sound when Win 10 was first released, so I don't expect any problems.

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Regards, 
Carl Ijames
Reply to
Carl

After you're done with the initials setup, and before you start butchering, errr... customizing, the PC, I strongly suggest that you make sure that all the updates are installed. Right click on what used to be the "Start" button in the lower left of the screen, and select "PC Settings". The "Windoze Update" icon and "Check for updates". Do this repeatedly until it declares that all updates are installed and working. Then, do it again anyway, because it sometimes lies. On a slow DSL line, this can easily take an hour, even with a fairly new machine, depending on how long the machine has been sitting in a warehouse.

Of course it's an obscure setting. Windoze 10 has the traditional "control panel" as well as the "PC Settings" page. There's some overlap, but in general, MS is trying to migrate all the settings over the new and improved PC Settings page. To make you can't possibly miss the new PC Settings page, MS had contrived 3 different ways to find it, all of them obscure: "3 Ways to Open PC Settings on Windows 10"

However, you're in luck. The table mode is in neither the old "control panel" or then new "PC Settings". To turn it on and off, you use yet another page of settings called the "Action Center". It's located in the lower right hand corner of the screen. "Turn tablet mode on or off"

However, we're not done yet. Turning on the tablet mode simply enables a few tablet features. You now need to change the "make Windows more touch friendly" setting so that it the machine can actually be used:

My free advice is to leave the stupid tablet mode OFF while she is learning to use the computah. It's much too easy to do something stupid by accident in tablet mode, and then spend the day trying to recover. Leave that horror for later.

No, it doesn't need to be turned on, but it should be on and working. Reading between the lines, I would guess(tm) that it's a laptop, not a desktop, which she might want to take it to the local coffee shop and show off her new toy to her friends. That means the wi-fi should be ready and working. However, if it's a desktop, ethernet is better (because it's faster).

Well, do you have any devices that need to communicate via BlueGoof? I have my portable GPS, headset, smartphone(s), BT speakers, and some stuff I don't want to talk about. If she's not a gadget freak and doesn't have any BT toys, then you can safely turn it off and leave it off. It can be easily turned on/off using the "Action Center" mentioned above.

Right. You could turn off the Dell PC and the tablet and iThing will work normally, if there such a condition for Apple products.

If you don't like syncing the iPhone and what I assume is an iPad to the Apple cloud, you can sync that photos and user data to the PC using iTunes. Ask someone who is more experienced with Apple products if this is a good or bad idea. Most people just sync to the cloud.

Tons. I have a script that I use for setting up a new machine. Every time I use it, I add a few more settings that need to be tweaked. However, there's no need to inflict my biases on her. There are some web sites with some tolerable general setup advice. There's no need to do everything these sites suggest, so please consider each suggestion individually. etc... There are also some YouTube videos on the topic:

To add to the aforementioned, I suggest that you install an image backup program: Macrium Reflect (free) It's a very fast and very useful image backup program. Buy a USB 3.0 external hard disk drive and use it for backing up the Dell PC. I've had several Win 10 machines go into a non-recoverable perpetual reboot mode, where the image backup saved my posterior.

Also, I hate the new "Metro" user interfarce and much prefer the Windoze 7 desktop look. I've installed "Classic Shell" on literally all my customers machines. Nobody has complained, and many haven't even noticed the change: Unfortunately, there some risk involved in this. Development has stopped on Classic Shell. It's just a matter of time before MS changes something and breaks Classic Shell. The author has posted the source code on Sourceforge so there's hope that someone can take of the maintenance.

You could do that, but I prefer to let the main user be the administrator (in order to keep my phone from ringing at odd hours). So, the first user you create will be an administrator account. If there are kids in the house, they will probably get stuck with a regular (non-admin) account.

The Windoze Defender auntie-virus program supplied with Win 10 is good enough for viruses and terrible for malware. For malware, I use the free version of Malwarebytes.

I personally killed about 15 Kaspersky licenses in the last year or so, and am schedule to remove a few more for a government contractor:

Prepared" However, It wasn't because of their connection to the Kremlin, but rather because Eugene Kaspersky previously got caught writing viruses designed to break the virus scanners of his competitors:

I was trying to get away from the computer for a few days and do some work on the house, car, shop, various toys, etc. Instead, I have to deal with one emergency after another. Now this...

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

After you're done with the initials setup, and before you start butchering, errr... customizing, the PC, I strongly suggest that you make sure that all the updates are installed. Right click on what used to be the "Start" button in the lower left of the screen, and select "PC Settings". The "Windoze Update" icon and "Check for updates". Do this repeatedly until it declares that all updates are installed and working. Then, do it again anyway, because it sometimes lies. On a slow DSL line, this can easily take an hour, even with a fairly new machine, depending on how long the machine has been sitting in a warehouse.

Of course it's an obscure setting. Windoze 10 has the traditional "control panel" as well as the "PC Settings" page. There's some overlap, but in general, MS is trying to migrate all the settings over the new and improved PC Settings page. To make you can't possibly miss the new PC Settings page, MS had contrived 3 different ways to find it, all of them obscure: "3 Ways to Open PC Settings on Windows 10"

However, you're in luck. The table mode is in neither the old "control panel" or then new "PC Settings". To turn it on and off, you use yet another page of settings called the "Action Center". It's located in the lower right hand corner of the screen. "Turn tablet mode on or off"

However, we're not done yet. Turning on the tablet mode simply enables a few tablet features. You now need to change the "make Windows more touch friendly" setting so that it the machine can actually be used:

My free advice is to leave the stupid tablet mode OFF while she is learning to use the computah. It's much too easy to do something stupid by accident in tablet mode, and then spend the day trying to recover. Leave that horror for later.

No, it doesn't need to be turned on, but it should be on and working. Reading between the lines, I would guess(tm) that it's a laptop, not a desktop, which she might want to take it to the local coffee shop and show off her new toy to her friends. That means the wi-fi should be ready and working. However, if it's a desktop, ethernet is better (because it's faster).

Well, do you have any devices that need to communicate via BlueGoof? I have my portable GPS, headset, smartphone(s), BT speakers, and some stuff I don't want to talk about. If she's not a gadget freak and doesn't have any BT toys, then you can safely turn it off and leave it off. It can be easily turned on/off using the "Action Center" mentioned above.

Right. You could turn off the Dell PC and the tablet and iThing will work normally, if there such a condition for Apple products.

If you don't like syncing the iPhone and what I assume is an iPad to the Apple cloud, you can sync that photos and user data to the PC using iTunes. Ask someone who is more experienced with Apple products if this is a good or bad idea. Most people just sync to the cloud.

Tons. I have a script that I use for setting up a new machine. Every time I use it, I add a few more settings that need to be tweaked. However, there's no need to inflict my biases on her. There are some web sites with some tolerable general setup advice. There's no need to do everything these sites suggest, so please consider each suggestion individually. etc... There are also some YouTube videos on the topic:

To add to the aforementioned, I suggest that you install an image backup program: Macrium Reflect (free) It's a very fast and very useful image backup program. Buy a USB 3.0 external hard disk drive and use it for backing up the Dell PC. I've had several Win 10 machines go into a non-recoverable perpetual reboot mode, where the image backup saved my posterior.

Also, I hate the new "Metro" user interfarce and much prefer the Windoze 7 desktop look. I've installed "Classic Shell" on literally all my customers machines. Nobody has complained, and many haven't even noticed the change: Unfortunately, there some risk involved in this. Development has stopped on Classic Shell. It's just a matter of time before MS changes something and breaks Classic Shell. The author has posted the source code on Sourceforge so there's hope that someone can take of the maintenance.

You could do that, but I prefer to let the main user be the administrator (in order to keep my phone from ringing at odd hours). So, the first user you create will be an administrator account. If there are kids in the house, they will probably get stuck with a regular (non-admin) account.

The Windoze Defender auntie-virus program supplied with Win 10 is good enough for viruses and terrible for malware. For malware, I use the free version of Malwarebytes.

I personally killed about 15 Kaspersky licenses in the last year or so, and am schedule to remove a few more for a government contractor: "As Kaspersky Deadline Approaches, Fears Loom That Contractors Aren?t Prepared" However, It wasn't because of their connection to the Kremlin, but rather because Eugene Kaspersky previously got caught writing viruses designed to break the virus scanners of his competitors:

I was trying to get away from the computer for a few days and do some work on the house, car, shop, various toys, etc. Instead, I have to deal with one emergency after another. Now this...

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Carl

In that case, definitely install Classic Shell. Make only two changes to the settings in Classic Shell.

  1. Change the start menu style to Windoze 7 as in:
  2. Change the start menu button to "classic" and select the middle button icon that looks like the original start button. After you click OK, it will take about a minute for the program to make all the necessary changes. Give it a bit of time before trying to use it.

Minimal (not zero) changes is the idea behind Classic Shell

WD uses an ancient version of Acronis True Image. It's a good program, but I think she might do better with the current version: The bad news is $50. The way I use it is to NOT install it on the hard disk. Instead, I use the recovery CD that the program creates, or can be downloaded from the Acronis web pile. I boot it and run the backup program from the CD. Not having any open files and not having Windoze running makes for a faster and more reliable image backup.

Transfer only the files that she created. In other words, transfer just the data. Leave the Vista programs alone and re-install 64 bit version on the new machine. Do the Win 10 updates first. Then make an image backup so that you can recover cleanly if anything goes wrong. Copy the user data files to wherever seems appropriate. It will NOT be the exact same directory name as in Vista because Win 10 has a different directly structure than Vista. Then install the programs. You may need to hand edit any config files that you copy over to fit the new directory structure.

Good luck. This kind of stuff is easy after you've done it 100 times.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Oops. That's totally wrong. Looks like WD no longer distributes Acronis True Image. Now, it's a different program that only backs up user files and is NOT an image backup program. So, when your hard disk or Windoze OS blows up, you get to reload Win 10 from scratch, update from scratch, reinstall all the programs from scratch, reinstall the WD backup program, and restore the user files from the backup. Yes, it takes forever. Speed is one reason why I use an image backup program such as Macrium Reflect. With USB 3.0 and an i7 CPU, I can typically do 6 to 10 GBytes/minute backup and somewhat less on restore with Macrium Reflect. With a typical Win 10 machine having

50GB of files, I can backup everything in 12 to 20 minutes. You could probably convince her to run a backup every day, especially if you save a "backup definition file" and point to it with a desktop shortcut.

One catch. Macrium is rather difficult to setup if you're not familiar with the program. Email if you're stuck and I'll try to throw together some install instructions in my non-existent spare time.

Good luck.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Windows 10 has been a nice step backwards for Microsoft. BSODs are a relatively common occurrence again, the stock GUI is nice n sluggish, programs crash and segmentation fault on startup with cryptic error messages. Performance on non solid-state media is terrible.

It's like working with Windows 98 again. Yay!

Reply to
bitrex

bitrex wrote in news:30JmD.153219$ snipped-for-privacy@fx48.iad:

Which can only beg the question:

WHAT THE FUCK POS ARE YOU RUNNING IT ON?

That is likely the same box it was then.

Lipstick on a pig works, but lipstick on a mamed old sow may have some issues getting to the slop trough.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

snipped-for-privacy@decadence.org wrote in news:png5sv$19r3$1 @gioia.aioe.org:

Hardware error. Wait... operator error for choosing the wrong hardware.

Stop trying to run it on a 486. What? You say it is modern hardware?

Then the memory sticks do not match the motherboard.

I'd bet you can generate the same type errors with simple benchmark tests even from within Linux.

You got something stretched past it's fill line.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

Nah, Linux works fine I rarely have problems with it even on older hardware.

Win 10s dumpy performance with spinning rust wouldn't be a problem if every laptop under $1000 came with one stock, they don't they're still putting 5400 RPM drives with a small solid state cache in 'em on the regular.

OS like Xubuntu's GUI and file manager responsiveness is only slightly worse with a cached 54000 RPM drive than it is with a SSD. The difference is astonishingly worse with 10.

Oh also speaking of which this may have changed recently but up until maybe a year ago Win 10 didn't even like to acknowledge the existence of other operating systems on a system, if you go to do a fresh install or it installed a major update it will just happily overwrite GRUB and wipe the MBR no problem at all. Thanks!

Reply to
bitrex

I have one machine Win 10 performance is acceptable on it's a quad core i7 laptop with a 500 gig SSD, the machine cost well over 1k at the time I got it.

It's like gosh forgive me for wanting to have a pleasant experience running the OS on multiple machines without having to suck the HW mfgr's dick every five minutes.

Reply to
bitrex

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