New Win10 desktop recommendations and advice please

[mike175]

If you restored from the DVD you should now have a clean system which would explain the lack of update history. Sounds like the Hard Disk must be working.

Glad you recovered your files 

Mike

[Midase]

ran two different anti-virus scans

From this, do I understand that you are running two antivirus programs? If this is the case you should only be using one as one will conflict with the other and give you problems.

[familydar]

Mike, I follow your logic but restore attempt said it failed after hanging at just 1% for several hours.  The system that eventually presented itself this morning had all my programs etc exactly as before.  After a little while it ground to a halt again, I'm guessing something is overheating but at least it stayed running long enough for me to copy the stuff I wanted to usb.

Midase I'm not running multiple av packages, I know that can cause conflict, but I routinely launch mbam, spybot s&d and ccleaner to generally housekeep and hoover up anything that might have snuck past mse or whatever the ms offering is called at the moment.

[mike175]

I didn't mean to suggest you don't need to replace the PC, just observing the HDD must be working. As with old cars there comes a time when you have to bite the bullet.

I'm sure you'll soon adjust to Windows 10. If you turn off most of the new 'features' it's not so different underneath.

Mike

[familydar]

Mike, you're right, my initial thought (because I always expect the worst) that the hdd had failed has been proven wrong.  And very glad I am too.

Others have said to me that win10 is not so bad/different.  Hardly a ringing endorsement!  Is it another instance of change not always being for the better I wonder?

Jane :-)

[mike175]

Jane,

I think much of the dislike of Windows 10 is a general dislike of change  We get used to a system and find it inconvenient to re-learn things we had mastered. For my purposes all the frills of Windows 10 are completely pointless so I uninstall or switch off everything I can. This frees up a good deal of system resources from running things in the background that I don't need.

The underlying system seems very stable and has better security than the older versions, and I have found it will run all the third party software I had installed under XP or 7 with no problems. In fact I use almost all third-party programs, such as LibreOffice, Serif PagePlus, Thunderbird, Firefox, PaintShop Pro, RootsMagic, to name a few. I can't comment on Windows Defender because I was already using Norton but some people seem to think Defender is adequate security. I know many people have had difficulties upgrading old machines due to hardware, drivers, etc. but on a new PC this shouldn't be a problem.

My biggest complaint is the Windows Update which seems to have a mind of its own and hogs a lot of the system when it runs. If you pay a little extra for the 'Pro' version instead of 'Home' it gives you more control over such things, so it might be worth researching that  I had the Pro version of 7 so automatically got Pro when I upgraded to 10.

Mike.