What software do I load on a lay's PC?

The_Ogre

The_Ogre

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A friend of mine bought a new laptop and dropped it off at my house. He's in the transportation business.

For a hardcore user, I can load stuff any day of the week, but after I've loaded VLC, I'm stuck.

Any ideas what kind of things I can load for him? His wife is an insurance sales lady and they have a 6 year-old.

It's a good friend of mine with absolutely no real IT skills, so just checking what a person in his situation would find fruitful as it's his first PC after starting his business.

Thanks, ladies!
 
VLC
Office (word, excel etc)
Thunderbird/Outlook
Chrome + adblock
Dropbox setup to backup
TeamViewer/AnyDesk
Glary Utilities + auto maintenance setup.
Adobe Reader
WinRAR
 
I don't really know hey. Maybe you should ask what he's interested in.
Besides for VLC I'd go for:
IrfanView +plugins
Vivaldi
LibreOffice
Discord is also a popular Skype replacement. Even bigger bonus if he's a gamer.
 
Honey Badger said:
A friend of mine bought a new laptop and dropped it off at my house. He's in the transportation business.

For a hardcore user, I can load stuff any day of the week, but after I've loaded VLC, I'm stuck.

Any ideas what kind of things I can load for him? His wife is an insurance sales lady and they have a 6 year-old.

It's a good friend of mine with absolutely no real IT skills, so just checking what a person in his situation would find fruitful as it's his first PC after starting his business.

Thanks, ladies!
Click to expand...

As little as possible, obviously. That is the safest bet.

I've been in the IT industry for a while and my first question is always: "What will you be using it for?"

Why do you need to guess or ask other people what to put on his laptop?
 
a decent browser other than what came with winblows. I use slimjet which is chrome but faster, better, lighter.

more about what do you remove - remove any bloat from win 10. all those stupid apps no-one ever uses.

ask him if he can handle / wants the win 10 updates, if not, switch it off for him. point how big the files are and how often they kill people's computers. also his data package may not be able to cope.

do not put dropbox on his computer unless he/they really really really want it - it is impossible to get rid off and not everyone wants to save all to the very insecure cloud.

something to read pdf

something to unzip stuff

something simple to view / edit photos

a decent anti-virus

malwarebytes

office / libre
 
Wait, does it have Windows 10? That is obviously the first thing to get rid of with a proper upgrade. :laugh:
 
Let ninite.com do the hardwork for you. Just click what you want and it installs the latest bloatware free versions of what you selected. Windows already comes with Defender so AV is sorted unless they visit dodgy sites etc.

For me it would be:

- 7Zip
- Foxit Reader
- TeamViewer
- VLC
- Chrome
- Google Drive or OneDrive

I'd also steer them to use the free Microsoft Office Online apps or Google Apps as their files are always backed up, accessible anywhere and not tied to a subscription service like Office 365 to name a few.

https://www.howtogeek.com/183299/a-free-microsoft-office-is-office-online-worth-using/amp/
 
Honey Badger said:
A friend of mine bought a new laptop and dropped it off at my house. He's in the transportation business.

For a hardcore user, I can load stuff any day of the week, but after I've loaded VLC, I'm stuck.

Any ideas what kind of things I can load for him? His wife is an insurance sales lady and they have a 6 year-old.

It's a good friend of mine with absolutely no real IT skills, so just checking what a person in his situation would find fruitful as it's his first PC after starting his business.

Thanks, ladies!
Click to expand...

Only this: Ubuntu
 
ekske1 said:
Only this: Ubuntu
Click to expand...
Yes, and no. Sometimes I find that when you encourage the average person to use Linux, you're inviting extra work for yourself.


Zoomzoom said:
ask him if he can handle / wants the win 10 updates, if not, switch it off for him. point how big the files are and how often they kill people's computers. also his data package may not be able to cope.
Click to expand...
Last I checked, Win 10 didn't really support turning off updates (I don't use Windows, so I admit my info might be outdated) ... anyway, i am not sure disabling updates is the right way to go nowadays, unless the machine in question will not be connected to the Internet. Updates are a necessary evil, unfortunately.
 
sicelo.m said:
Last I checked, Win 10 didn't really support turning off updates (I don't use Windows, so I admit my info might be outdated) ... anyway, i am not sure disabling updates is the right way to go nowadays, unless the machine in question will not be connected to the Internet. Updates are a necessary evil, unfortunately.
Click to expand...

You can turn it off. Bit of a hassle, and you have to keep redoing it, but you can. And updates are not a necessary evil, especially when they are absolutely massive (GBs big) and are quite likely to crash your system. Winblows (and quite a few other software companies) absolutely fail to take into account the fact that most of their users worldwide are not sitting with high speed unlimited internet.

All this stupid drive to put everything in the damn cloud is stupid, inconsiderate and dangerous. The cloud is not inviolate, it's damn expensive, and so callously first world indifferent to reality.
 
Ubuntu 18.10 :)
Once it's setup by you. There is little for them to do but click on what you've installed and allowed.
It's simple click and work now and even on a normal HDD it boots quite quickly.
 
Really if I were absolutely forced to use Windows 10 I'd just run a registry script on every startup to disable updates.
 
do Windows.

only geeks, super propeller heads & hyper nerds run Linux.
I know, I'm one of them.

all other "mere mortals" need Windows.

after you've installed it, goto a site called "ninite".
select all and install.

problem solved.

& don't listen to the trolls.
leave windows update enabled.

:-)
 
ThatOtherDude said:
do Windows.

only geeks, super propeller heads & hyper nerds run Linux.
I know, I'm one of them.

all other "mere mortals" need Windows.

after you've installed it, goto a site called "ninite".
select all and install.

problem solved.

& don't listen to the trolls.
leave windows update enabled.

:-)
Click to expand...
So your advice is to install multiple of the same programs, so he will have 4 antivirus programs running at the same time?
 
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