Just got my new laptop

Funkstard

Received my Inspiron 6400 yesterday, and so far it's great. I've been setting it up so far and have installed Firefox, Ad-Aware, iTunes, Nokia PC Suite, Skype, VLC media player and have uninstalled some of the useless trials & Dell stuff that came loaded onto it. I've also transferred my 10gig library of music which is sitting nicely in the 120gb harddrive. As for antivirus, I have a 90 day trial of Norton Anti-virus which I'll upgrade when the trial runs out.

Is there anything near-essential that I should have on the laptop for security or whatever? I think I have everything pretty much covered. I'm just going to be really careful not to load too much crap on it and slow it down. Am I set?

Ruu_Old

Get one of the free anti-virus scanners (AVG, avast! or Anti-Vir), don't bother with the renewal, far better than Norton and much less of a resource hog. I assume is it XP Service Pack 2 installed, get Windows Defender and a firewall (Zone Alarm, Sygate Personal Firewall or Keiro) as well as the Windows one.

Funkstard

I went to download the ZoneAlarm firewall, but it said there were compatability issues as I have a McAfee personal firewall installed

Ruu_Old

I would chuck McAffee as well (good luck getting rid of it though. If you have everything else installed, then you should be set.

petes

Ruu wrote:

I would chuck McAffee as well (good luck getting rid of it though. If you have everything else installed, then you should be set.

McAfee is a pain in the tits to uninstall on the home systems. Well the first time it is anyway.

Funkstard

Feck is it? I was thinking I'd have to do it if I didn't buy the upgrade. Are those other anti-virus programs really better than mcafee?

Ruu_Old

I think there might be a program to uninstall McAffee totally (is it the security suite one or just the firewall?) You might have to google for it. I find (and probably many others) that the ones available for free that I mentioned work just as well, talk up less diskspace, less resources and are updated fairly often.

Funkstard

It's the McAfee security center. I'll leave it for now and prob do something about it when I start to get renewal popups. Those free ones are definitely as good as McAfee?

GrumPy

McAfee is terrible IMO

melekalikimaka

McCrappy

TerrorFirmer

Get rid of mccrappy and norton, install avg antivirus, spybot, zonealarm etc and you'll be set.

Ruu_Old

Funkstard wrote:

It's the McAfee security center. I'll leave it for now and prob do something about it when I start to get renewal popups. Those free ones are definitely as good as McAfee?

In my opinion yes, even better in most cases for detection and I have been through a lot of computers. Every Dell I have ordered I chucked all the bundled stuff and on with the free software.

majiktripp

McAfee is easy to uninstall,disable the Virus scan serive by clicking on the mcafee icon in toolbar and disabling it. Once thats done just run the uninstaller from Add/Remove programs, and it should de-crap your system fine!
I'd go with AVG,had doubted it for years until it found Win32-Sality (bastard BASTARD of a virus) that no others were, including my favourite Dr.Web....

Funkstard

Ok so I got rid of McAfee (there was an uninstaller in the add/remove programs tool - presume this did the trick?), and have ZoneAlarm running and AVG installing. One thing, the free version of ZoneAlarm didn't have alot of the features that are in the full version. Is that an issue?

Also, now I have ZoneAlarm, AVG and Ad-Aware installed. Am I missing anything?

Thanks for all the help

Fabritzo

Check your updates in www.windowsupdate.com and maybe get spybot.

fifib

hey funkstard
can i ask ya how much you paid for your inspiron 6400? and how long did it take to deliver?
was thinkn of ordering one this weekend. mite go for an upgrade in the processor tho for the few extra quid to the 1.8 or 2 GHz

Funkstard

I paid €1300 for it, I added a few upgrades, and it took 8 days to deliver, one day later than stated.