Essential utilities for laptop running W7

[News]

Taking Dave's point that this NG gets filled with OT s**te, I'll ask anyway ...

Looking at replacing my Tosh NB200 which still happily runs XP, but is not suitable for upgrading. Current choice is a used Lenovo Thinkpad T430 running W7 Pro, 32 bit. I need 32 bit, not 64.

First thoughts are firewalls, anti virus etc. The Tosh is currently running the standard Windows firewall with Avast. Also use Spybot, Malwarebytes and CCleaner. Assuming a new (refurbished) laptop running a new 32 bit install of W7 Pro, should I make any changes?

[cl]

I recently bought one, nice little machine, using it now. I've put Ubuntu on mine and it works beautifully (I've left a small partition with the W7 installation on it for *dire* emergencies!).

Yes, get rid of all of them! I'm sort of serious, as long as you don't do silly things all of that virus/malware protection cruft causes far more hassle than it cures.

We reently bought a new MSI PE70 2QE for my wife and added an SSD to it. So, we re-installed W8.1 on the SSD instead of on the main hard disk and without all the Norton and other junk it's a *far* more usable machine.

[tabbypurr]

The best utility nowadays is one called Linux. It's just as easy to use as windows in 99% of cases, and you can try it without installing or changing a thing. I like avlinux, but there's almost every flavour out there you can think of.

NT

[cl]

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes. Install Linux instead ;)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I'd not call posts about computers OT - they are just a tool which might well be used for DIY.

Did you follow my thread about my Acer 5536? I took John Rumm's advice about a replacement.

Everyone will have their favourites, but I stick with AVG free and Spybot.

[Capitol]

+1

[Davey]

+2.

[News]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

The comment was slightly tongue in cheek :-)

Indeed. Lenovo seem to receive nothing but positive comments, so that is the way I'll go.

Noted, thanks.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

My original wasn't. ;-)

[bert]

Gave up trying to get it to work on our old Toshiba laptop

[Johnny B Good]

Only Avast is likely to slow things down. A few versions back the free version used to be the most lightweight of the active virus protections available. I don't think this is quite so true with the current versions which lost their win2k compatibility a couple of years back. The free, on- demand-only, version of MBAM is useful to have, as is SpyBot S&D and CCleaner, since they don't poke their fingers into the works unless you run them.

I'm afraid to say, loss of responsiveness is simply the price you have to pay for pro-active Virus threat detection and Avast Free may still be the least obnoxious option in this regard.

Well, unless Norton have re-written their AV to be far less hungry of system resources, removing it *will* make a real difference. However, upgrading the boot drive from an HDD to an SSD makes a far greater improvement than every other upgrade put together so it's that which is probably accounting for the improved usability rather than ditching Norton "and other junk".

[Davey]

Hopefully it's been fixed, but there was something a while ago about some software being loaded onto Lenovo laptops that created all sorts of problems. My friend suffered from that. I'll try and find a ref.

[Davey]

I gave up on Norton some time back, when it insisted on scanning everything before letting me in to use the machine. On an already slow PC, this was hell. It could be turned off, I found, but it put me off Norton for ever.

[John Rumm]

Assuming you are using the machine behind a router with its own firewall and NAT, then there is dubious benefit to a software firewall. They add egress filtering, but unless you know enough about what should and should not be running on the machine, you are unlikely to be able to make sensible answers to the questions they invariably throw up.

Malwarebytes can be a life saver - whether you need the paid for real time protection or just the scan after the fact free version will depend on what your surfing habits are like. Even with the best care in the world, it only takes one poisoned ad server to compromise a machine with something.

Antivirus of some kind is also generally essential for a machine being used online and with email.

Yup, a SSD from new will make a huge improvement in performance. I have not tried recent versions of Norton, but if its like it was a few years back, the load on the system was quite high.

[Brian-Gaff]

Yes that is true, but there are things like drive bys and other hackers out there, so it pays to at least run the minimal stuff. Microsoft security essentials or whatever its now called caught a nasty trojan a week or so back very smarrtly, on a hacked web site I presume, then some person tried to send me the same one three times by email and it spotted the attachment and stopped me doing anything with it. Well other than deleting it of course.

No I tend to keep a few tools that I can run directly, ie not installed, like Hijack This and similar bits, at least they do not sit there slowing things down. Brian

[News]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

I don't mind OT posts really, although ignore anything with Muslim in the subject :-)

What I do dislike is lack of snippage. When Rod and Tough Guy start, neither will snip a line, and I have to scroll through pages of stuff to see the most recent messages. So I don't. Sorry guys.

[News]

In message , Davey writes

Excellent, thanks. This particular one is being shipped with a clean install of W7 and essential drivers, so should be OK, fingers crossed.

[Bill]

In message , John Rumm writes

A friend got an email from Virgin, his isp, which appeared to be genuine, saying that a PC or tablet had been sending out spam emails from his account. I went in and we ran Malwarebytes on his W10 PC, which found and removed a bunch of suspicious 'things'. Other scans then came up clean. I didn't have a clue about how to check whether his iPad had a trojan, so we didn't.

This got me into thinking about firewalls, and I loaded Comodo firewall onto my W10 test machine. This was initially disastrous and confusing because W10 had been waiting with an update, so that coincided with the new installation, so I wasn't sure what caused the machine to fail to restart.

Remove and re-install Comodo seemed to work and I've been looking at what it does, which seems to be mainly reporting that the Synaptics touchpad is homesick (!).

I'm not sure whether a software firewall would pick up any of this as it would presumably configure itself to let emails through, but it has made me think. Unsuccessfully, so far.

[Davey]

Hear, hear! I try to snip to leave just what is essential to understand my reply. Sometimes I forget, but mostly I get it right.