I just took possession of a used laptop off ebay.

What are all the cool kids downloading from ninite these days for basic web surfing protection? I hate the old laptop because it takes for freaking ever to do anything, and I blame in part the virus protection and malware protection for that. I don't want to load this machine with unnecessary stuff. So what do I need?

It's a windows 10 machine.

Thanks!

WIN10 comes with Windows Defender built in.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wind...nsive-security

Get a solid state disk first
 

The best thing you can do is get an SSD.

I bought one for $30 and it made an old laptop run like new!

Win10 will suck without one.

Cool. It has an SSD.

It's always a good day when mbpark pokes his head up!

QFT

and he's right.

Mitch!! http://cellar.org/2015/willy_nilly.gif

glatt, remember this?

May be worth checking the list, I remember Happy Monkey objected to one on the list.

You can put Alexa on your WIN10 laptop (free download from the Microsoft Store or Amazon). On fully compatible WIN10 models the most recent version of the app even works handsfree, like an Echo device, by using the wake word functionality. The battery in the laptop makes it a portable Alexa device.

Long before trying to fix it, first discover where the bottleneck is. Is a bottleneck durnig power up? Or during operation?

Reasons for a slow bootup include the so many programs that load then even though they are not (yet) being used. Such as Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office. Microsoft's System Internals program called Autoruns can then identify and turn off that loading.

Bottlenecks during operation can be in CPU use, Page (memory) faults, IO faults, or so many TCP/IP connections during some internet access. Bottlenecks can be identified by Process Explorer. Too many Tcp/Ip connections by TCPview. All programs from Microsoft.

Some websites open connections to over 50 other URLs before the page fully loads. Closing or blocking those connections can massively increase execution speeds.

List of connections diverted to 127.0.0.1 attempts to divert many TCP/IP connections. Those can be closed by TCPview or can be eliminated by an IP blocker.

SSD is useful when the system has limited memory and is doing too many page faults to the hard drive. Doing those same page faults to the SSD is the equivalent of adding more memory. SSD solution works best when that is the bottleneck. But again, better is to identify the bottleneck long before implementing a solution.

If you use Skype or Hotmail, you probably don't want to block them.

Man... That guy is hard to read even when what he's sa is actually correct.