I recently bought a PC, a 2 y/o office-environment dual core 3.0ghz processor, 250g hard drive, 4mg RAM with preloaded Win7 (including keyboard, mouse and dual monitor adapter for $90). I've since loaded Office & Outlook 2007 from discs I already had.

So far it's it's been a gift. I'd a failure on another machine running XP and I haven't got around to fixing it yet.

Prior to this, due to a temporary move, I bought a small Acer laptop pre-installed with Win8, now upgraded. I rarely use the touchscreen or touchpad, preferring a mouse. Though I will admit that this is a handy feature - I can use it on the m/bike when I travel.

I think Win8 was designed with touchscreen controls in mind, seeing as how that seemed to be future with mobile phone technology and Microsoft was counting on familiarity with this system. I think they didn't take into consideration all the old f**rts who have been using XP and PC's for years. Win8 was just too unfamiliar.

I dunno about Win10 - maybe for the laptop. I use it less.

I think I will skip the upgrade to Windows 10 for quite awhile until after I have read quite a few reviews from people who have been using it for a few months at least.

UnSubRocky wrote on Jan 29^th, 2015 at 3:36pm:


It sounds like you have collected malware from somewhere.  Have you run Malwarebytes?

UnSubRocky wrote on Jan 29^th, 2015 at 4:30pm:


I tend to only look at Forums (OzPol and PA) and various News sites.  However, occasionally, I need to Google for "answers" and that is where you can pick up Malware. I use Mozilla/Firefox.  I haven't used IE for a decade or more.

Run Malwarebytes each week. Spybot another free program will find "cookie tracking" things but not much else.

UnSubRocky wrote on Jan 29^th, 2015 at 3:36pm:


Right-click on your drive in File Explorer, then select 'Properties'' (you may have to do this a couple of times, there's
sometimes a bug which sends you to the 'System' page. Just exit and re-try). On the resulting screen, Disk Cleanup
is about 2/3 of the way down, same as XP/Vista/7.

For Disk Defragmenter do the same, and instead of Disk Cleanup click 'Tools' on the tabs at the top. And there's Disk
Defragmenter and CheckDisk.

Kat wrote on Jan 29^th, 2015 at 6:55pm:


My next bit of advice was to 'PM Kat'......

Neferti wrote on Jan 29^th, 2015 at 4:38pm:


Half the trouble I had was with Firefox. I had been using that since the early 2000s, because people recommended it over IE to help ward off hackers. But then the malware came along and I couldn't do a great deal with my old computer, or my new computer. I gave up and used Chrome, and I haven't had any problems. I suppose I can run spybot again, since it didn't do any harm the last time. And it does have a defragmenter/cleanup.