New Laptop Windows8 - What security?
 

Just purchased a new Laptop (HP Touchscreen) for wife, now considering Security & software

WHICH magazine suggests MS8 inbuilt security is more than adequate - comments please

Am considering MS Office 365 Home Premium subscription at approx £70/yr - this gives upto 5 licenses (for family) and includes Cloud storage - again comments please

Thanks in advance

PZU - Out of Africa (Retired)

Windows Defender is okay but you can do (considerably) better: AV-TEST - The Independent IT-Security Institute: Jan/Feb 2013

How many of the licenses will you actually use? Do you need MS Office or would an alternative like Google Docs or OpenOffice/LibreOffice do the job? Do you run software into the ground or upgrade to newer versions every few years?

Office 365 with its subscription payment model is a scam - especially as its cloud based. Can you be sure the internet is always available to you?

Just buy the version of "normal" Office you need

Office Software
 

For the price, you cannot do better than Libre Office 4 (for WP/SS/DB/Presentation) and Thunderbird for mail. The only real glitch I have had with Libre Office is that I can't get it to cope with forms created in MSWord.
Thunderbird is excellent for mail, although it doesn't have the same integration with a calendar that Outlook does. Try them before committing yourself to £70 per year!
For the occasional document that needs to be shared, would a free Dropbox account suffice?

For the past few years I've been using the free Avast anti virus. I had a couple of nasties made it to my hd.

Now before others 'jump down my throat' when I mention Norton Ohhhhh slows down the pc, great memory usage et al. I am using now, Norton Anti Virus (windows7/8) NOT Norton 360 which could very well require greater processing and memory constraints. Very happy with it. It comes with up to three pcs cover. £14.99 from Argos plus 12 months of free updates.

Having said that, other anti virus programmes are available as are other retail outlets.

Daz

"For the price" assumes above that you put no cost value to your own time. The amount of hidden costs associated to Office clones and IMAP/POP email is not inconsiderable.

MB, it does rather depend on what your needs are. Where are the hidden costs for those creating and reading simple documents and spreadsheets?

I just reloaded my old disk of Office 2003 onto a new Windows 8.1 machine yesterday. Despite Microsoft claiming 2003 is not compatible, guess what? -- it all works just fine, including touch screen ability.

Security
 

Much as it's moaned about, I've been using Norton Internet Security for as long as I can remember & installed it on more PC's than I can remember. Other than an iffy upgrade (once) & some spurious application blocking (rare) it's never caused any issues & never let anything in.

The iffy upgrade was mid subscription & wiped my remaining time to renewal (about 100 days) - a call to Symantec got me 150 days without any issue!

All I would say against it is;

Don't use it on a sloth of a PC.
Don't go for the easy online renewal - it's cheaper to get a new retail pack.

Very good advice Thrust, that's what I intend to do after the twelve month update expires. The thing is.....Do I have to download the Norton removal tool to remove current Norton before loading the new retail one in 2014

Daz

If you need 100% compatibility for documents, buy Microsoft Office.


If you want to buy a security suite, I suggest you give a look at ESET Smart Security which is as good as Kaspersky or BitDefender, but lighter. Norton is also a good alternative -- I still have to figure out why so many people do not suggest it.
If you want to go free, Avira and Comodo Firewall is a good combination.


CCleaner, Malwarebytes, IObit Malware Fighter and Advanced SystemCare are a must-have for me. I also use both Defraggler and Smart Defrag 2. Notice I use two softwares for the same things, that's just me. It's all down to you.


For email, Thunderbird is awesome, it even has extensions that integrate a calendar if you need one. If you buy Microsoft Office, stick to Outlook -- I am loving the last version but I still use Thunderbird sometimes.

Daz,

No you don't need to use the removal tool to upgrade. When you get the retail copy (irrespective of what iteration it is) you can just use the product key to renew the subscription. When a newer version is released you will be notified & given the chance to upgrade & Norton will clean up as it upgrades (This is all NIS I'm on about, not 360 or AV).


Re office software - I'm a die hard Office 2003 user as I've never liked or had the patience to like the "ribbon" that was introduced in Office 2007 - I'm currently using 2003 with Win 7. Office 2003 can be had for virtually nothing & although MS list it as being incompatible with Win 8, there seems to be plenty of users out there who don't have a problem. Food for thought if it's of any interest.