New
#1
New 10 user, observations and questions
Hi all. As I said in my first thread... this is my second... I migrated over from Sevrenforums.com, where I'd gone for support since 7 came out with my then-new Desktop PC. I was reluctant to try 10, thinking it was completely different in the way of user interface, and who knows what kind of file system. And partly because I'd had a Win8 phone and wasn't impressed, thinking the Win10 desktop might look similar.
I'd been using computers in my office machines job(now retired) since the late '80s with an IBM 8088. Never a power user, but I could build a PC out of a scrap heap and make it work well. Fast forward to Win7 and that was as close to PC heaven as Microsoft had ever been. I gradually compiled a folder of info to fall back on if the system crashed.
My main tools to keep it lean and clean were NIS, which was previously, through the XP years, a horrible kludge, but seemed to work. Then, with 7, either Norton tightened up, or 7 was powerful enough to use it to its fullest. With ERUNT backing every boot, Malwarebytes every so often, Ccleaner prior to every weekly backup, and Acronis TIH 2009 to create those full images, it cruised along glitch-free and I had a machine that I trusted to be dependable and secure. I could forget about rebooting for days, and mostly only if I'd been handling lots of picture files or simple video crunching with WMM, and before backups. I was reluctant to change.
Then my seven year old Win7 PC began showing signs of a failing power supply and the last of the smoke got out a week ago. So here I am with my new Win10-64 bit HP Pavilion 550 a114, 8GB ram and a 1 TB drive. I'm pleasantly surprised. It looks very familiar to Seven. I didn't need to buy a new Office suite with MS Publisher after all, even the salesman told me I needed to upgrade. And Norton transferred over seamlessly. It's noticeably faster and easy to customize. However I'm accumulating questions.
Finally to the point:
1. I bought a Backup Plus Slim 2TB Seagate external drive. I thought it would have a full system image backup function, but it only copies data files. So if my system crashes, I can't just restore the whole thing with its little dashboard. Is there any reason I can't just format it as a bootable NTFS drive and use Acronis like I did with my Seven system? And if Acronis 2009 worked on Win7, do any of you know if it will work with Win10?
2. Which leads to the next question. I needed to open my Acronis backup on the old external drive to copy my data files over to the new box. I tried plugging in my flash drive with the Acronis recovery software, but could not get this new thing to boot anything but Win10. In the BIOS I disabled Fast Boot and Secure Boot, and enabled Legacy Support. Then changed the boot order in Legacy Sources to both USB Floppy/CD for the flash drive, and also to ATAPI CD/DVD for an identical CDROM. Still boots to windows. Some day I will need for this to work, can someone tell me what I missed?
But finally, I installed Acronis on the new machine only to access the encrypted backup on my old external drive, and got the job done. I don't recall if I had to set it for compatibility mode or not. Any ideas if I can trust Acoinis 2009 on this computer, or should I buy a newer version? I want to do a full image backup every week. It bailed me out a couple of times over the years, almost like magic.
3. Is it okay to use Sysinternals Process Explorer instead of task manager? It seems to work when I tested it. I did find that Sysinternals Autoruns will not work.
4. MBAM and Ccleaner work fine, but what about the registry backup/restore program ERUNT and ERDNT? Any reason it can't be trusted with Win10?
5. Should I leave Fast Boot disabled in the BIOS? It seems better to reload everything, at least on a cold boot. Am I understanding correctly that Fast Boot just reloads a hibernation file from the previous session?
6. It came with a trial version of Office 360. Can it be installed alongside of Office 2007? I mostly need MS Publisher, but maybe the newer Word and Excel 360 might be better. Would there be conflicts running the two side by side, and is it worth spending the $$ to upgrade? If not, is it safe to uninstall Office 360 without botching the Office 2007 application?
Sorry for the essay, it was a sort of introduction combined with questions.
Thanks,
Rusty