4 Tips For Your New Laptop

Bennett Haselton writes with four big tips for anyone blessed by the holiday buying frenzy with a new laptop; in particular, these are tips to pass on to non-techie relatives and others who are unlikely to put (say) "Install a Free operating system" at the very top of the list: Here's Bennett's advice, in short: (1) If you don't want to pay for an anti-virus program, at least install a free one. (2) Save files to a folder that is automatically mirrored to the cloud, for effortless backups. (3) Create a non-administrator guest account, in case a friend needs to borrow the computer. (4) Be aware of your computer's System Restore option as a way of fixing mysterious problems that arose recently." Read on for the expanded version; worth keeping in mind before your next friends-and-family tech support call.

> If you or a friend -- especially a non-techie friend -- received a laptop for Christmas, these are my favorite low-cost high-benefit tips that anyone can follow. They apply to any operating system, although I'm writing from a Windows-centric point of view.

Yes, a lot of this will be obvious stuff to techies, but I've found that if a human asks a techie "I just got a new laptop, can you give me any advice?", the answer frequently will (a) not cover these crucial bases, and/or (b) include a lot of unhelpful stuff to impress the listener. The following is a baseline for what I think a useful answer should consist of. (And if you're the techie, you may want to walk the laptop owner through following these directions, since I'm not actually spelling out what icons you have to click on, etc.)

(1) If you don't want to pay for an anti-virus program, at least install a free one.

Your PC probably came with a trial version of an anti-virus program that will stop working after a month unless you upgrade to the paid version. Of course you can do that if you want. Especially if you ever think you might want phone tech support for your anti-virus software, I expect it's better for a product that you've paid money for.

On the other hand, I know people who thought that if they didn't want to pay for the upgrade to their PC's default anti-virus program, their only option was to let it expire and let their computer run unprotected. If you don't want to pay for a non-free program, install a free one -- Wikipedia has a list of 15 different free or freemium anti-virus products for Windows. PC Magazine gave their "Editor's Choice" award for best free Windows anti-virus to Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 1.70 in 2013 and AVG Anti-Virus Free in 2012, so either of those will work.

(Yes, I know you guys know this. But pass the word on to your Mom or kid brother with the new laptop.)

(2) Save files to a folder that is automatically mirrored to the cloud, for effortless backups.

The era in which everybody talks about backing up, but nobody actually does it, should have ended completely in 2013. Old-style backups, even the incredibly easy options, still mostly required you stop what you were doing for a minute, connect to a remote server or connect a piece of hardware to your computer, and twiddle your thumbs while waiting for some copy process to execute. So nobody bothered.

With cloud-mirrored folders, there's no excuse any more. I found out about Dropbox by asking a mailing list, "I would really like it if there were an online backup service that let me open and close files from a local folder so that there was no delay, but as soon as I made any changes, would automatically be queued to be backed up over the network to a remote host," and my listmates said, "That already exists." Windows 8 comes with the similar SkyDrive service already built in.

You can read a detailed comparison of Dropbox vs. SkyDrive vs. Google Drive, but the key point is to use one of them to mirror one of your local folders to the cloud, and get into the habit of saving stuff to that folder. Obviously this may not apply to you if you have something special going on (if you're creating large multimedia files that won't fit within the several-gigabyte limit imposed by these services, or if your privacy concerns are great enough that you don't want to back up files online), but it's good enough for most people. The horror stories about people saving months or years of writing, and then losing it all in a hard drive crash, should never happen to anyone again.

(3) Create a non-administrator guest account, in case a friend needs to borrow the computer.

Some of my friends and relatives have no problem telling people, "No, I don't care if you need to check the weather, you can't touch my computer!" But if you can't resist the urge to be helpful if someone needs to borrow your laptop for a few minutes, then eventually one of those people will mess it up somehow -- either by installing a game, or visiting a website that installed malware on your computer, or just changing a system setting that you can't figure out how to change back.

When the day comes when someone needs to borrow your computer, you may be too rushed or might not know how to create an unprivileged non-administrator account that they can log in under. So go ahead and do it when your computer is brand new, while the thought is still fresh in your mind. Then if people who borrow your computer sign in under that account, in almost all cases, nothing that they do while logged in should interfere with your user experience when you log them off and log back in as yourself.

That's not a completely secure solution to stop someone from accessing private files on your computer. (There are many pages describing how to boot up a Windows machine from a Linux CD, in order to access files on the computer -- they are usually described as "disaster recovery" options, but they can also be used to access files on a PC without the password.) However, it will stop most casual users from messing up your computer while they borrow it.

(4) Be aware of your computer's System Restore option as a way of fixing mysterious problems that arose recently.

I say "be aware" because, unlike the other three tips, this may not ever be something that you have to actually do. However, intermediate-level computer users just need to understand what it means: to restore your computer's settings and installed programs to a recently saved snapshot, while leaving your saved files untouched. This means if your computer has started acting funny in the last couple of days, you may be able to fix the problem by restoring to a snapshot that was saved before the problems started.

Intermediate users sometimes confuse this with either (a) restoring files from backup, or (b) doing a system recovery (which generally refers to restoring your computer to the state in which it left the factory). So if you're the techie doing the explaining, make sure they understand the difference. (A system recovery will often fix problems, too, but then of course you'll have to re-install all your software; a system restore is more convenient since it only undoes the most recent system changes.)

So these are the first four things I would tell people who were the recipient of a new laptop. What would you tell them?

Interesting potential issue

[jeffmeden]

"(2) Save files to a folder that is automatically mirrored to the cloud, for effortless backups."

Anyone with experience in ransomware know if they encrypt the files in, say, the user folder (where all of these mirrored cloud services live by default) does that echo to the cloud host, ransoming everything there too? If thats the case then it might be a good idea to at least stay one step ahead of the bad guys and put the folder somewhere else in the system.

Shove your data into the cloud

[silas_moeckel]

Unencypted personal data should never be stored in the cloud. If you need a revision control system use one, If you need backups use one. Neither is particularly hard, hell windows built in backup works pretty well. But encrypt anything leaving your possession (not a bad idea for stuff not leaving your possession either) but basic bits like bios HD passwords work pretty well without any performance penalty.

Better sync/backup

[gaspyy]

First, syncing to cloud is not backup. Second, being at the mercy of a provider doesn't strike me as a good idea in long-term.

Better invest in a NAS. A 2-bay Synology would suffice. 2 4TB drives in Mirrored Raid work great. WD has the "red" line of drives specifically made and tested for NAS storage. They are not as fast but run cool, silent, no vibrations.

Most NAS units run on linux so you can easily add syncing, versioning, "personal cloud", maybe use to play movies on smart TVs via DLNA and so on.

Finally, from time to time do proper backups. For home use, proper backup means burning data on DVD/BD - on 2 separate discs.

Re:Or Windows RT

[CastrTroy]

I don't know why this is marked as flamebait. I have a Surface 2 (they dropped RT from the official name), and I have to say that I love it. Even as a programmer. It's the only tablet that supports SD cards and dropping to a bringing up a command prompt (cmd/powershell) out of the box. The browser is capable enough that you don't need website apps that basically mirror website functionality. There is a lack of apps, but that's probably my only complaint. Also, from a development point of view, I'm working on my first app, and I have to say that I enjoy the experience much more than my experiences with Android or IOS.

Better idea

[Murdoch5]

I just go with my family and friends when they want a new notebook. I check out the software and hardware and I make sure it fits there needs. I always get them to buy good quality computer protection software like Norton 360 and I always tell them to call me before anyone touches the computer for work, such as a futureshop or bestbuy. The biggest single point that I can make or recommend, NEVER buy a notebook from a seller who can't tell you solid hardware details, such as the audio chipset, the rev on the processor or model of the HDD. The reason being if they can't give you the proper stats, they shouldn't be selling notebooks. I also always make sure they buy a backup drive and make sure they setup Norton or any other software to auto backup for them. Basically I just help them get to a steady state and from that point on I just make sure I'm around for repairs or help. Never send someone who doesn't know how to, to buy computer hardware, they will get bullied into buying what they don't need.

Re:Cloud != Backup

[Chewbacon]

Dropbox and even BitTorrent sync has versioning support. Better than nothing.

Re:You miss one point

[gnasher719]

About creating that guest account - I have NEVER let anyone 'borrow' my laptop. It is mine, passworded, encrypted and the whole nine yards.

MacOS X has a nice feature - even with full-disk encryption turned on, you can log in as a guest with Safari as the only application. Hard drive is still encrypted except for a small partition.

Re: Cloud != Backup

[multimediavt]

It does in the short term. Most of the cloud services let you recover/undelete a file for up to 30 days.

You're right that it's not a "real backup", but honestly you aren't going to get most people to do a real backup with any consistency. Cloud backup of a documents folder is a useful stopgap.

No, it's not and please, for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, stop telling people to put their data in someone else's hands! It's not like money where it is insured at a bank. This is your data and you need to learn how to keep it safe. Unfortunately, data security is part of owning a compute device. It always has been, but we now have some glaring examples of why this is true. New users need to learn this and learn good data security practices and placing files in the cloud is NOT good data security for anyone! Dammit!