need help approaching brand new computer
March 19, 2021 8:34 AM Subscribe
Please help me get up to date on caring for a new PC! Specific questions (recovery disc, installation and Windows 10 guide) after the jump -
For the first time in over a decade, I bought a new desktop PC (Dell OptiPlex 7080 SFF with Windows 10 Pro). I'm out of touch and would love help with these -
1. Backup/Recovery Disc
This is the stage I create a backup/recovery disc to have on hand in case I mess up the computer. I attempted to do that, and found out no one does discs anymore. The programs I tried to run (Dell Recovery Tool, Windows Media Creation Tool) want a thumb drive. This seems counterintuitive to me (thumb drives aren't particularly reliable. and they tend to get lost). How do I make a backup/recovery file without a thumb drive? Can I create an image to store on the cloud (and just download to a thumb drive in case I need it)? Or even better, can I somehow still make a recovery disc (my new computer has an optical drive)?
2. Clean Install?
In the past, I formatted and installed Windows myself, making sure I don't have crapware installed. Do I need to do this with a Dell computer? (if I do, I'm nervous of disconnecting the extra hard drive to do this. should I be? )?
3. Windows 10 Guide (for former Windows users)?
I (am somewhat embarrassed to admit I) have avoided Windows 10 until now, and could use a guide to get used to it (=make it look like XP ;-)). Most guides assume I know nothing about computers. Is there a guide that assumes I know computers, just not Windows 10?
TIA!
For the first time in over a decade, I bought a new desktop PC (Dell OptiPlex 7080 SFF with Windows 10 Pro). I'm out of touch and would love help with these -
1. Backup/Recovery Disc
This is the stage I create a backup/recovery disc to have on hand in case I mess up the computer. I attempted to do that, and found out no one does discs anymore. The programs I tried to run (Dell Recovery Tool, Windows Media Creation Tool) want a thumb drive. This seems counterintuitive to me (thumb drives aren't particularly reliable. and they tend to get lost). How do I make a backup/recovery file without a thumb drive? Can I create an image to store on the cloud (and just download to a thumb drive in case I need it)? Or even better, can I somehow still make a recovery disc (my new computer has an optical drive)?
2. Clean Install?
In the past, I formatted and installed Windows myself, making sure I don't have crapware installed. Do I need to do this with a Dell computer? (if I do, I'm nervous of disconnecting the extra hard drive to do this. should I be? )?
3. Windows 10 Guide (for former Windows users)?
I (am somewhat embarrassed to admit I) have avoided Windows 10 until now, and could use a guide to get used to it (=make it look like XP ;-)). Most guides assume I know nothing about computers. Is there a guide that assumes I know computers, just not Windows 10?
TIA!
The Windows 10 trick you most want to know about is Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which runs a Linux kernel in a VM and allows you to have POSIX-y UNIX-like and the GNU userland in that space.
About that recovery tool: Use the support pages for your Dell device to see if there's a recovery partition on the device which will be able to recover Windows to factory-fresh state. For a Microsoft-fresh Windows 10, there are DVD ISO images available at your favourite web search, mine lands at UK-specific https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10ISO. Your computer's on-board firmware carries a licensing key to approve your use of Win 10 Pro.
You're going to want a thumb drive for the size of the recovery image and storage reliability over a burned DVD image. You're also going to want to keep any recovery item in a safe place -- it's not the thumb drive's fault if you don't store it securely!
posted by k3ninho at 9:12 AM on March 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
About that recovery tool: Use the support pages for your Dell device to see if there's a recovery partition on the device which will be able to recover Windows to factory-fresh state. For a Microsoft-fresh Windows 10, there are DVD ISO images available at your favourite web search, mine lands at UK-specific https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10ISO. Your computer's on-board firmware carries a licensing key to approve your use of Win 10 Pro.
You're going to want a thumb drive for the size of the recovery image and storage reliability over a burned DVD image. You're also going to want to keep any recovery item in a safe place -- it's not the thumb drive's fault if you don't store it securely!
posted by k3ninho at 9:12 AM on March 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
One option, if you want a Start menu more like older Windows versions, is to install the freeware program Open Shell.
posted by gudrun at 9:22 AM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by gudrun at 9:22 AM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
if I do, I'm nervous of disconnecting the extra hard drive to do this. should I be?
There's no need to disconnect a secondary drive to do a fresh install. Just don't install onto it and windows setup will leave it alone. If the primary drive is nvme and the secondary is sata, it'll be super obvious which is which from windows setup's selection screen.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:24 AM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
There's no need to disconnect a secondary drive to do a fresh install. Just don't install onto it and windows setup will leave it alone. If the primary drive is nvme and the secondary is sata, it'll be super obvious which is which from windows setup's selection screen.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:24 AM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
If the PC is factory fresh, I can't really see any point to creating a recovery image for it before you start. The Tom's Hardware setup guide you linked to is good. Given that this is a fresh PC so there's nothing of yours on it already, you should be good to go without unhooking any drives first if you don't want to.
I completely distrust PC manufacturers' OEM Windows installations. I have yet to encounter one that works better than a plain vanilla installation done using a USB stick bearing the standard installer that Microsoft offers for download from its own site, plus perhaps some drivers gathered from the OEM's support page. I've seen a lot that work worse. The bundled software that OEMs provide is almost always somewhere between useless and actively detrimental. Dell's isn't the worst but I'd rather use vanilla all the same.
Microsoft's Windows 10 installer is the most straightforward to use of any they've ever released. If you've done XP installations in the past, installing 10 is like that only much easier. In particular, the 10 installer does a much better job of supplying appropriate hardware drivers out-of-the-box than any previous version ever has. Most of the 10 installs I've done have needed nothing downloaded from the hardware manufacturer's support site; as long as the Ethernet card is supported internally by Setup - and most are - it will just connect to Windows Update and figure it out.
The best Windows 10 guide I can offer to a former XP user is, unfortunately, Suck It Up. Vista was awful, 7 was Vista with some of the new annoyances calmed down, 8 was horrible, 10 is only slightly more annoying than XP in a lot of ways and less so in others. You can use third-party tools to make it look more like XP did visually, but to my way of thinking there's less effort in just adapting to it mostly as-is.
The big thing that's in 10 that wasn't in XP is User Account Control. In XP you could (and should have) set up at least two user accounts: an administrative one for system admin work, and a restricted user account for everything else. Very few people actually did this, though, which meant that most XP installations ran with full admin rights active most of the time, which made them easy prey for malware.
Windows versions since Vista have had UAC, which makes administrator accounts (still the default) work a lot like a restricted user account with lurking, suppressed admin capabilities that you can usually turn on right when they're needed by clicking a really annoying and intrusive dialog box that sometimes fails to appear until you click a pulsing icon in the task bar. This all goes away in Safe Mode, where an admin account just runs with full rights all of the time.
In Vista, UAC got a justified reputation for standing for User Annoyed Constantly. Later versions have calmed the user experience down quite a lot, allowing a UAC-enabled admin account to just do more and more things without asking for explicit permission first. You can harden it up with Group Policy settings but most people don't.
The end result is that most people don't bother creating multiple user accounts, even when doing so would make perfect sense because multiple people need to use the machine, and just run the single administrative account that Windows creates when first installed, and reflexively click Allow on the UAC prompt every time it pops up without thinking about it. UAC is effectively just another pointless Next button inserted into every software installation.
User accounts, by the way, can either be traditional local Windows accounts or they can be Microsoft Accounts like you'd use to sign into Microsoft services such as OneDrive or the Microsoft Store. Personally I prefer to set Windows up with a traditional local account, use a separate Microsoft Account to sign into OneDrive if I'm going to use that (it's handy for getting photos off phones), and ignore the Microsoft Store altogether. Ninite remains my preferred way to get software onto Windows boxes and it doesn't need signing into.
Another big thing in 10 is that it comes with inbuilt anti-malware protection in the form of a version of Windows Defender that's actually good enough. So you don't need to, and shouldn't, install your own antivirus tools on top of it.
Here's a guide to turning off most of the bullshit advertising and tracking built into 10.
10 also comes with a backup facility built into Settings that's essentially a clunkier version of Time Machine. But it works, and it also allows you to make system images that will let you restore an installation plus all software from the image if the live installation went belly-up and you had to start again. The initial Windows Installer process is now quick enough that if I had to unsnarl a totally busted installation I'd just do a clean install and then recover from an image made by Windows Backup after the system was set up the way I wanted it, rather than trying to do clever things with bootable recovery media.
Good luck! Having factory-fresh hardware available is the best way to learn about how to install Windows in 2021.
posted by flabdablet at 10:31 AM on March 19, 2021 [7 favorites]
I completely distrust PC manufacturers' OEM Windows installations. I have yet to encounter one that works better than a plain vanilla installation done using a USB stick bearing the standard installer that Microsoft offers for download from its own site, plus perhaps some drivers gathered from the OEM's support page. I've seen a lot that work worse. The bundled software that OEMs provide is almost always somewhere between useless and actively detrimental. Dell's isn't the worst but I'd rather use vanilla all the same.
Microsoft's Windows 10 installer is the most straightforward to use of any they've ever released. If you've done XP installations in the past, installing 10 is like that only much easier. In particular, the 10 installer does a much better job of supplying appropriate hardware drivers out-of-the-box than any previous version ever has. Most of the 10 installs I've done have needed nothing downloaded from the hardware manufacturer's support site; as long as the Ethernet card is supported internally by Setup - and most are - it will just connect to Windows Update and figure it out.
The best Windows 10 guide I can offer to a former XP user is, unfortunately, Suck It Up. Vista was awful, 7 was Vista with some of the new annoyances calmed down, 8 was horrible, 10 is only slightly more annoying than XP in a lot of ways and less so in others. You can use third-party tools to make it look more like XP did visually, but to my way of thinking there's less effort in just adapting to it mostly as-is.
The big thing that's in 10 that wasn't in XP is User Account Control. In XP you could (and should have) set up at least two user accounts: an administrative one for system admin work, and a restricted user account for everything else. Very few people actually did this, though, which meant that most XP installations ran with full admin rights active most of the time, which made them easy prey for malware.
Windows versions since Vista have had UAC, which makes administrator accounts (still the default) work a lot like a restricted user account with lurking, suppressed admin capabilities that you can usually turn on right when they're needed by clicking a really annoying and intrusive dialog box that sometimes fails to appear until you click a pulsing icon in the task bar. This all goes away in Safe Mode, where an admin account just runs with full rights all of the time.
In Vista, UAC got a justified reputation for standing for User Annoyed Constantly. Later versions have calmed the user experience down quite a lot, allowing a UAC-enabled admin account to just do more and more things without asking for explicit permission first. You can harden it up with Group Policy settings but most people don't.
The end result is that most people don't bother creating multiple user accounts, even when doing so would make perfect sense because multiple people need to use the machine, and just run the single administrative account that Windows creates when first installed, and reflexively click Allow on the UAC prompt every time it pops up without thinking about it. UAC is effectively just another pointless Next button inserted into every software installation.
User accounts, by the way, can either be traditional local Windows accounts or they can be Microsoft Accounts like you'd use to sign into Microsoft services such as OneDrive or the Microsoft Store. Personally I prefer to set Windows up with a traditional local account, use a separate Microsoft Account to sign into OneDrive if I'm going to use that (it's handy for getting photos off phones), and ignore the Microsoft Store altogether. Ninite remains my preferred way to get software onto Windows boxes and it doesn't need signing into.
Another big thing in 10 is that it comes with inbuilt anti-malware protection in the form of a version of Windows Defender that's actually good enough. So you don't need to, and shouldn't, install your own antivirus tools on top of it.
Here's a guide to turning off most of the bullshit advertising and tracking built into 10.
10 also comes with a backup facility built into Settings that's essentially a clunkier version of Time Machine. But it works, and it also allows you to make system images that will let you restore an installation plus all software from the image if the live installation went belly-up and you had to start again. The initial Windows Installer process is now quick enough that if I had to unsnarl a totally busted installation I'd just do a clean install and then recover from an image made by Windows Backup after the system was set up the way I wanted it, rather than trying to do clever things with bootable recovery media.
Good luck! Having factory-fresh hardware available is the best way to learn about how to install Windows in 2021.
posted by flabdablet at 10:31 AM on March 19, 2021 [7 favorites]
USB drives are used because generally your backup image, after all the stuff you wanted got installed, is the size of SEVERAL DVDs, and who uses optical drives nowadays? But you can get USB drives or even even microSD cards in the sizes of hundreds of gigabytes, or even just connect a small portable HD or SSD to your PC. (Small being a relative term, as PC hard drives nowadays are in the terabyte range)
posted by kschang at 12:23 PM on March 19, 2021
posted by kschang at 12:23 PM on March 19, 2021
Seconding the Open Shell recommendation.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:58 PM on March 19, 2021
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:58 PM on March 19, 2021
This thread is closed to new comments.
Dell doesn't really want you to reinstall a fresh install of windows, so you would need to set up your own install image (on a thumb drive) using the key they give you. I have not tried to so this for a Dell recently, I would recommend using the default installation as it will have drivers set up and the default software on my last Dell was totally fine.
posted by JZig at 8:54 AM on March 19, 2021 [2 favorites]