December 27, 2018
Ingrid's Laptop
This is a Dell 5000 series with an i7 processor,
Ingrid's 2018 Christmas gift.
I am busy setting it up. It comes with Windows 10.
Frankly Windows is disappointing me.
I thought I was done saying that, but a number of things
are not up to my expectations. Menu selections in the setup
dialogs are impossible to use, or awkward at best.
I almost gave up trying to type a birthdate (why can't I just
type the numbers?)
Anti-virus
My expert source of information (Dallan) says he could never get Sophos to work,
but he just enables the built in "Windows Defender".
As most people know the well known things such as Norton and McAfee
are Malware (Scareware) in and of themselves, and people in the know avoid them.
However this Dell laptop has McAfee tangled in with Windows Defender in some bloatware like scheme.
It may be possible to eradicate McAfee, but for the time being I am leaving McAfee disabled and
turning on periodic scans by WD.
Recovery disk
In actuality this is a USB flash stick.
They tell me I need at least a 16G flash stick,
so I dug around and found a 16G stick, but maybe
I need a bigger one? Who knows?
You do a search for "Recovery" then select, "create recovery disk".
I click on "save system files" -- it takes forever and then reports
that "it had a problem". Who knows what the problem was.
Searching locates a Dell site that gives fairly useless support,
but suggests that "this might work" if you don't click the option
to save system files. Hey, they offered the option and it seemed
like a sensible idea.
The same site gives the following instructions to actually use the
disk (I wonder if it will work without the system files? I guess
we won't find out until we actually need to use it).
This process formats the hard drive and removes all data.
Be sure you have backed up your files prior to beginning this task.
- Insert the recovery media into a USB port or a DVD drive, depending on the format you used to create the recovery media.
- Power the computer off.
- Power the computer on and, at the Dell logo screen, tap the F12 key several times until you see Preparing one time boot menu in the top right corner of the screen.
- At the boot menu, select the device under UEFI BOOT that matches your media type (USB or DVD).
- Select your keyboard language.
- At the Choose an option screen, select Troubleshoot.
- Select Factory Image Restore.
- Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the reset process.
This will take some time and your computer will restart.
Feedback? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org