Now imagine your friend didn't have you, was paying Best Buy or some other outfit to do it, at $$$ per hour, go slow to earn more $$$.
An iMac, once out of the box, takes probably less than 10 minutes to get running and on the Internet (I'll even add that it be wireles with WPA2 encryption, but using DHCP and broadcasting SSID) for the average person, with no expert help.
Now imagine your friend didn't have you, was paying Best Buy or some other outfit to do it, at $$$ per hour, go slow to earn more $$$.
I'm sure that all over America there are kids and others who will take your new computer and get rid of trial-ware, will slap on a free antivirus. By default you have windows Firewall there and Windows defender which are very good. It seems that preinstalled programs like MacAfee insert their own firewall so after deleting MacAfee you must make sure windows firewall is turned on.
By default Windows 7 will steer you towards automatic updates. I like to approve any update but for friends I make sure it's on automatic
What I'm saying is that locking down a new computer can be done very quickly. Not a big deal and nothing you have to panic over and run out and buy a Mac for.
One dicey thing is making restore disks. The situation is very fluid and sometime the computer comes with them and sometimes you have to make them. A newbie who skips making them can get into big trouble. But buying actual restore disks can be cheap. $30 or so from HP. My nephew got into trouble and one call to Dell was enough for them to send out free restore disks. But he got it done the next day by restoring from the recovery partition