Advice appreciated. I finally replaced my 10 year old desktop with XP for a new dell Inspiron 3252 (Pentium processor) yesterday. It booted up fine and I elected not to sign in with a Microsoft ID and clicked on as many privacy things as I could. I had seen so many threads in the past warning about Windows 10. I have a notebook I use for email and internet that has 8.1 and I have avoided the upgrade to 10. Any tips on what I need to do to my new desktop to make it more secure. It came with a one year McAfee. I also do not use the cloud at all. Thanks for any help!
Press Win+S, which will bring up the search bar, and type “Customer Experience Improvement.” One of the top results should be to change the program settings. Click on that, and you’ll get a very simple window asking if you want to be in the program. Select “No, I don’t want to participate in the program” and most of the telemetry stuff that phones home to MS will be turned off.
Make sure Windows Firewall is turned on (Win+S > Search for Firewall), and turn on User Account Control (Win+S > Search for “User Account Control”) to either the second or third level. That will prevent anything from being installed on your system without your notification. Never turn it off!
McAfee is “okay,” but it’s free and will force you to upgrade in a year for a fee. If you’re using Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 (wasn’t clear on which you got), Windows Defender is MORE than sufficient as an anti-virus/anti-malware program. Matter of fact, Microsoft’s Defender keeps the pace with, and in the case of system performance it BEATS, third-party AV products. You can see if it’s running by searching for Defender.
Sounds like you’re already on the right path!