Cleaning a W10 laptop

[ef37a]

I hope to be taking delivery of a refurbished Lenovo T510 early next week.
Brief spec' is, i7, 8G ram and a 160 G SSD. Not a very big HDD I grant you but since I want the machine for internet duties mainly it will not be a problem. I have about 2Tb or so on external drives anyway so I can dump stuff off if necessary.

I would however like to prune the drive of any junk I don't need. Games are one thing. Never use them. I also suspect the laptop comes with a free-for-a-time malware package. I have used Ms SE for over 7 years and run the free Malwarebytes every month or so and never had any trouble. Can I therefore safely ditch any bloated virus protection software and rely instead on Defender and MWB?

Any other programs that I can safely remove? Do tell.

Dave.

[The Elf]

For many years I've only relied on Defender and not had a problem. I'd definitely remove MWB.

Use Revo uninstaller and let it clean out all the left-behind junk. Also use CCleaner to sort out the registry. With these tools you should be able to remove most of he junk. Windows features may need a visit to the Control Panel. For a good, basic clean and brush-up this should do you fine.

Don't forget to remove the USA keyboard and rid yourself of that annoying language reminder. While you're at it you may want to go through and turn off all those nonsense Windows options, such as sending analytics to Microsoft.

[Arpangel]

For many years I've only relied on Defender and not had a problem. I'd definitely remove MWB.

Use Revo uninstaller and let it clean out all the left-behind junk. Also use CCleaner to sort out the registry. With these tools you should be able to remove most of he junk. Windows features may need a visit to the Control Panel. For a good, basic clean and brush-up this should do you fine.

Don't forget to remove the USA keyboard and rid yourself of that annoying language reminder. While you're at it you may want to go through and turn off all those nonsense Windows options, such as sending analytics to Microsoft.

Elf, Just wondering why you'd remove MWB? I do get the feeling that the free version is a bit like a perceived security blanket that does nothing in reallity though.
I'm also relying on Defender on Win 10, and C Cleaner, never had any issues, but don't go on the internet very much at all on that machine, all my internet and music stuff is on Mac or iPad

[The Elf]

Elf, Just wondering why you'd remove MWB?

Too intrusive and never does anything useful IME.

[Arpangel]

Elf, Just wondering why you'd remove MWB?

Too intrusive and never does anything useful IME.

Yeah, know what you mean. Maybe I'll delete it.

[DGL.]

Another thing to do would be to do a reset. That restores Windows to a supposedly blank state even securely deleting old files if told to do so.
Again as for AV software, happy defender user here, doesn't seem intrusive/processor heavy.

[James Perrett]

If this is from a professional refurbisher you'll probably find a fairly vanilla version of Windows 10 has been installed. It will start up in the same way as a new computer and take you through the final installation steps where you can set up your preferences.

The first thing to do is to check all the right drivers have been installed.

[ef37a]

If this is from a professional refurbisher you'll probably find a fairly vanilla version of Windows 10 has been installed. It will start up in the same way as a new computer and take you through the final installation steps where you can set up your preferences.

The first thing to do is to check all the right drivers have been installed.

Yes, I had to setup my son's W10 laptop this time last year. I was told I had done it wrongly? I had set the startup to an email address because the instructions said that was 'recommended'. I was told that it is better not to do that, cannot recall the alternative but I shall watch out for it this time!

Right drivers for what? I shall of course get the latest ones for my KA6. Not sure if the 8i6 does W10 drivers but I can live without.
It comes with W10 Pro btw, not sure that is of much advantage?

Dave.

[James Perrett]

I don't know whether Lenovo have something similar, but Dell have a check up tool that you can download to ensure that you are up to date. It found a few things on my computer - I think the refurbisher may have just installed a standard Windows 10 image rather than one specifically intended for this machine.

I'd be very surprised if your 8i6 wasn't supported as Focusrite have drivers that work with my ancient interface. There are one or two products that they dropped support for quickly, but I think most of their mainstream interfaces are fine with Windows 10.

[Drew Stephenson]

My 8i6 works on my windows 10 machine no problem.
Or, at least, I hope it will do again once I put my space back together!

[IvanSC]

Happily, as someone else said earlier, Win10 pro or home comes with a built in option to do a complete factory-fresh reinstall. When it arrives, go to Settings recovery & select reset this machine. It will ask you if you want to keep any of your existing data files, etc., just tell it "no" Works like a charm & the worst that you might have to do is chase down the odd hardware driver, but since it is a Dell you will have no problem getting the latest versions off their website.

[Stratman57]

Yes, Lenovo does have similar tools to keep drivers and firmware up to date.

Windows Defender and running CCleaner after deleting any files or evaluation software works a treat.

Regards, Simon.

[Watchmaker]

WIN10 comes loaded with lots of bloatware that can eat your background bandwidth and consume resources better targeted elsewhere. I spent hours uninstalling them. I also noticed a lot of network activity for programs I never used that were porting usage data back to Microsoft's data centers. Here's a link to get you started, but I took a much more severe approach myself, which I will leave for you to Google if you wanna go there.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-remove-unwanted-apps-from-windows-10-even-though-microsoft-doesnt-want-you-to/

Also, because WIN10 is SAAS, there is a good chance Window's next update will bork something for you. One infamous update actually deleted entire directories...and not just caches, which will most likely be deleted for you. I edited my registry to prevent Windows from messing with my machine.

If you configure your firewall, every update will reset your settings to enable bloatware to communicate again - hence the need to uninstall apps via powershell. You can prevent this behavior by making changes to the group policy.

Fortunately for me I am not entirely unschooled in such things and I had to seriously increase the amount of configuration items to tweak for WIN10 from any prior version and I still don't trust it.

[Dynamic Mike]

I'm afraid you're in for a fair amount of angst & frustration. W10 is laden with bloatware, spyware disguised as 'helpers' & unnecessary apps. However, unless you're as knowledgable and experienced as Watchmaker my advice (from painful experience) would be take it slowly deleting stuff. Try disabling or hiding things before you delete them. Some work in mysterious ways & others simply re-appear at the next update anyway. And in fairness the footprint of most is pretty small.

Don't be so naive as to think of it as being your computer, short of you installing another OS, it's Microsoft's computer and you're priviledged to be allowed to use it as they see fit. Failure to adjust to this mindset will have a serious impact on your mental wellbeing!

Also watch out for little gems hidden in sub-menus such as 'let MS help you type by sending us every word you write'. Also it defaults to MS using your bandwidth to distribute updates to other users.