Preparing

taid said:

Everything seems to be ok but i have a problem as when the computer recovers from sleep there's what appears to be a screen saver which disappears when i click on it leaving me a log in screen.

That's called the Lock screen and it can be turned off.
Enable or Disable Lock Screen - TenForumsTutorials


Denis

taid said:

yesterday evening I did a clean install and all appeared to go well.

taid,

I would have made a system image first & backed up my drivers.
Doing so on a new computer allows me to get back to its as-delivered state if I need to.
Mind you, I have never found any need to do that on any Dell or HP computers and that initial system image & the driver backup just sit on my backup disks using up space.


Denis

taid said:

I never set a password, just leave the box empty so clicking on it brings up the desktop.
I saw Brink mentioned somewhere that that a local account which is what i have 'must' have a password.
I've installed W10 a few times over the years and always left the password box empty and never had this problem before.

taid,

I think you misunderstood something Brink write.
MSAccount-linked user accounts must have a password.
Local user accounts do not have to have a password. I vaguely recall that there was one particular thing that was awkward or impossible in Windows 7 if a local account did not have a password.
Once you have disabled that lock screen I expect your reboot to lead you straight to the Desktop.

I cannot remember how the Admin prompt behaves when the Admin account has no password. When you've rebooted after disabling the lock screen, you can test this out by right-clicking on the Start button and choosing Device manager / Event viewer / Disk mgmt / Computer mgmt / PowerShell [Admin].
This is what I see

and I expect that it is what you will also see.


If you have other user accounts on the computer then your password-less user account will be a gaping whole in your security while you are logged in to any of them whilst connected to the internet.
I have additional [spare] local, Admin, password-protected user accounts but I never use them while I'm online anyway. They are just there for fault-finding.
my ditty - Create two spare local, password-protected Admin accounts [post #2] in Windows 10, 11 - TenForums


All the best,
Denis

taid said:

Not being a computer whiz kid

And I never intended to learn anything about OSes.
Until 2011, when I found out that Dell had sold me a computer in 2010 with a faulty WiFi driver*** that I had to investigate on my own, I had managed to focus exclusively on Excel, Access & Word so I could get useful things done. Happy days.
[*** I had tested everything on receipt but had to go to a hamburger shop to test the WiFi. It had a 3-bar signal strength so all looked well as far as I knew. When I finally fixed the WiFi the following year, I went back there and discovered that I had been sitting on top of their WiFi router when I had done that initial test.]

All the best,
Denis

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taid said:

I disabled the lock screen, now the laptop wakes up to the log in screen - at least I'm half way there!!! All I need is to be able to disable that now.

John,
Oh. I thought it just went straight through if the password was blank [empty].

You could choose to give it a decent password then set it up to pass straight through to the Desktop using NetPlWiz.
Sign in User Account Automatically - TenForumsTutorials
And do note the cross-reference to another tutorial to use first if your NetPlWiz dialog has no checkbox.


Denis

taid said:

... came with an M.2 which I updated to an NVMe ...

John,

M.2 disks [cards] can have Sata interfaces or NVMe interfaces.
Some M.2 computers can use both M.2 Sata & M.2 NVMe cards.
- I think somebody told me that computers that can handle both do not make full use of the speed advantage that NVMe offers. I'm not at all sure about that though.
- M.2 NVMe cards are rapidly becoming the norm. I recently bought a larger M.2 Sata card for one computer and it was very difficult finding one.
- I also bought two USB enclosures for M.2 so I would have something to test them with / populate them before fitting. I had to buy separate ones for the M.2 Sata & the M.2 NVMe because the enclosure that claimed to be able to handle both failed to do so.


Denis