Buying a new laptop can be a difficult venture. You must decide which one is right for you. Depending on what your needs are, there are tons of things to consider like hard drive space, graphics cards, and general ease of use.

But once you find your dream computer, there are a few things that you must do. Here are some tips to follow after you purchase your laptop to make your computing experience a pleasurable one.

Register and Update Windows

Image via Flickr by Microsoft Sweden

An important part of purchasing your computer is actually registering (and successfully activating) Windows. It activates all the perks of having Windows as an operating system, such as Windows Media Player, and it also enables desktop personalization.

Next you’ll want to download all system updates and service packs. You’ll want a really fast internet connection for this, because these can be huge files and take a while to download. However, they’re vital to making your computer safer and run much smoother. These updates patch up any bugs or glitches that were newly found, and they streamline the performance of the operating system as well as add new features.  To answer super user “Hennes” question, it doesn’t matter which variation of Windows 7 you have, Pro or Home, it will run, performance wise, the same, if you’re worried about performance issues think about either adding more RAM or upgrading to Windows 8, which for the for the most part is a more streamlined and smoother operating system.

Rid your Computer from Unwanted “Bloatware”

When you purchase a computer, you’d imagine that you’re starting with a clean slate. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Most computers are loaded with unwanted games and software (referred to as bloatware, since it bulks up what should be a clean slate). The most efficient way to truly free up your computer is to install a brand-new, store-bought copy of Windows onto your hard drive.  This will wipe out everything that was on the hard drive (so make sure you save everything you wanted to keep on an external drive or disc) and leave a clean and smoothly operating system, free of unwanted, useless bloatware.

If you don’t feel like doing this, or don’t want to buy a new copy of Windows, you can try manually uninstalling the offending software, by going to Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features. From here you can go to each program you don’t want and click uninstall. For programs that are more deeply rooted, like anti-virus software, you can go to the developers website and search for the “complete uninstall” procedure and follow their steps to completely eradicate it from your system.

Anti-virus and Security Software

While many computers come with standard anti-virus software, it’s important to make sure you have the right program to deal with potential intruders. That being said, you may want to consider forking out a few dollars for an all-encompassing anti-virus program, such as Norton Antivirus software, or save some money and get basic protection, with something like AVG Anti-Virus software.

Going together with anti-virus software is security scanning software. What you’re looking for are programs such as malware that will make your computer run at a turtle’s pace. By running a security scan, you can remove all the unwanted unintentionally downloaded programs off your hard drive before you get into computing that would release sensitive information.

Schedule a security scan for about once a week (you can set it to automatically begin when you want, in whatever increment you choose) to keep your computer free from malicious programs. Keep this software running in the background, and it will detect and quarantine any questionable and infected files that you may have just unintentionally downloaded and it will also warn you and deter you away from possibly unsafe sites.

Back Up Software and Recovery

Any computer with Windows will have system recovery loaded to it. Recovery restores your computer to a pre-existing state if the worst should happen.

If you drop your computer or it suddenly fails due to a power surge or something else, recovery will make your computer work again if possible. Backing up, on the other hand, is basically insurance for your computer. You can take all the files that you never want to lose, and you can put them on an external hard drive. Or if you don’t want to buy one of those, you can copy the files on to a DVD or CD and keep them in a safe place. These measures ensure that you will never have to fret over lost work.

Physical back-ups aren’t your only option – there are plenty of ways to back up your info using an online cloud service, doing this will automatically back up your files as you make them, and no matter what happens to your computer, or backup drives, your files will be downloadable from their hard drives on their servers.

Power Saving

Make sure that, after registering Windows, you go into your personalization and check your power saving scheme. Here, you can configure your Windows 8 power plan settings and options. Choose how long until your computer turns off after it’s idle, as well as setting a screen saver. Both of these things will save you on your energy bill and keep your computer running longer.

No matter what laptop you choose to buy, following a few simple steps for your new laptop will go a long way. Although you shouldn’t expect problems on a brand new machine, it’s all about peace of mind. You can use the computer at your leisure and not be worried about the problems that can compound over time.

I’m currently waiting on building a new system (which will run windows 8) but I wanted in on the windows contest . I didn’t really want to use one of my windows 8 licences on my old system, so I figured I’d run the enterprice evaluation version on a VHD, which I could discard to get back my current system to its previous state once the new system is built. I found a great guide by Harold Wong on technet, and while I was working finishing up the post this guide is based off , discovered you could install to a hard drive using the same method, found that r.tanner.f had used a similar method for an install on a actual drive. I used a windows 7 system to set this up and run it on, and you will probably find it easier if you use the WAIK from the same architecture as this system. This is pretty much like wubi – allowing me to run a seperate copy of windows without repartitioning my drive.

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Congratulations!

Great job everyone. We had a great go around with this contest and lot of participants. With over 2000 posts during the contest period there were plenty of questions and answers about Windows 8. For more stats, Bob put together a stats web app where you can compare contest stats and even personalize it! Go give it a check out for more details on the contest as a whole.

All winners will receive an email from the Stack Exchange team with instructions on how to get your prize. (Note: the T-Shirt emails have already been sent, so if you achieved Level 1 and didn’t get the email, check you spam folders and make sure you weren’t suspended for cheating.)

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October 26th is coming fast. Are you ready for Windows 8? Super User is!

We’re having a party and you’re invited. Ask and answer questions to complete the challenge levels, and complete different tasks like editing, voting, and blogging to win the eight tile challenges. Each level you beat and each tile you finish enters you for sweet prizes, including the grand prize of a Microsoft Surface RT! more »

Windows 8 is out for MSDN account holders (including students with MSDN-AA access)!  And it’s set to release on October 26th.  With that there are bound to be tons of questions in regards to Windows 8.   This post is meant to be a collection awesome questions/answers found on Super User that are tagged Windows 8.  This is what we’ve got so far:

General Understanding/Installation

• What is the difference between Windows 8 Pro and Windows RT?

• How can I upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 and keep my files and applications?

The New Modern Apps

• How do I exit a Modern UI app?

• How do I turn off Modern UI in Windows 8?

• How to delete contacts from the Windows 8 People app?

As time goes on, and more questions/answers come along, we’ll update this help all you Super Users out there with the new Windows 8.

Yesterday, after two of my family members in turns tried to fix a video card driver installation error for 2 – 3 hours, they couldn’t get it to work. Trying it over and over, each time it stopped the progress bar somewhere before the middle, to finally throw up this screen:

Yeah, this is exactly the moment where you would freak and pull out your hair; especially to plan on finishing the day with some casual gaming. So, their next step was to fire up the device manager in an attempt to manually update the drivers by feeding the devices with the directory full of INF files. But apparently, the devices weren’t so hungry:

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If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last few months, you probably know all of the following:

• Windows 8 is the name of Microsoft’s new version of the operating system.
• Windows 8 sports Metro, an attempt to introduce touch interactions as a first class citizen in Windows without crippling mouse and keyboard interaction.
• Windows 8 is different. If you’re stuck in 2001 with Windows XP, or GNOME 2 and/or KDE 3, obviously you also aren’t going to like Windows 8. Also I have a few dancing bunnies for you to look at.

This is the most important thing to realize: Windows 8 is different. Different in huge, important ways: It marks the transition to a brave new world in ways similar to what Windows 95 did. To do so, it abandons UI conventions that have been around us since then. The Start button? Gone. The Start menu? Gone. Pressing Start to shut down the computer? No more. Menus (and ribbons)? A thing of the past. Titlebars? Oh, please.

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I have been using the Windows 8 Developer Preview for about 5 months or so and in order to install it on my PC, I had to create a rather small partition on my primary hard drive consisting of only about 16GB. Thankfully, a clean install of Windows 8 will fit comfortably within that space and still provide enough room for some basic utilities and drivers (of course, I do have other secondary partitions that I use for installing applications).

During the installation of a particular application, the free disk space on the partition dropped to about 28MB. One of the users over in the Root Access chat room suggested that I try filling the disk until it is completely full and then blogging about what happens – hence this article. I was a bit reluctant at first since I didn’t want the hassle of reinstalling anything if it became corrupted somehow, but since I have up to date backups of everything, I decided to proceed anyway.

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Super Users often find ourselves installing operating systems. Whether you run your own computer shop, manage an army of thousands of corporate workstations, or are just the tech-savvy friend everyone you know calls for help, you’ve probably had to install various flavors of Windows over and over again. Most of us have also spent a fair amount of time installing different Linux distros, running data recovery disks, and using various live CDs.

The problem that presents itself is managing all of the required disks. There are at least 6 common flavors of Windows 7 alone (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate for both x86 and x64, plus Enterprise for you corporate types). Add in various distros of Linux and you start to see why some computer techs carry around whole folders of CDs.

I’ve been aware of Pendrive Linux for a while, which lets you setup a flash drive with multiboot Linux software, and can add a single Windows installation. But what if you wanted to have a single flash drive with all versions of Windows 7, as well as all the standard Linux boot disks? It took some work, but I decided to do this and the final result is impressive.

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Ask some Windows users why they aren’t using Linux and chances are you will hear “because [program] doesn’t have a Linux version.” Although cross-platform software is popping up all over the place, there are still a number of applications that are restricted to a single platform – and for a lot of software, that platform is Microsoft Windows.

However, all is not lost. Although Linux has its own executable format and set of system libraries, a tool exists that will allows us to run a good portion of our Windows applications directly in Linux. This tool is of course, Wine. Wine initially began as a small project that was designed to run simple 16-bit Windows applications. As time went on, the target shifted to 32-bit applications and the long and hard process of rewriting Windows’ user-mode libraries began.

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