[Closed] Software for new laptop

Libre office or google docs/sheets are good free alternatives to MS office/365

Windows built in security is all you need really.,

Dunno about photo editing.

Open or Libre Office is free. If you 'must' have MS Office then Group On Home and Student 2019 for £17.99 one off https://www.groupon.co.uk/deals/microsoft-office-2019-717522861.

Depending on the manufacturer it's probably more about what you need to uninstall vs install, getting rid of bloatware (or just doing a full new OS install) is usually step 1.

As has been said above, Windows Defender is competent enough and the least hassle to maintain of the free AV solutions and a paid-for AV solution doesn't offer much (if anything more) for a home user.

It's worth spending time getting to know Edge, it's a decent browser since they changed it to the Chromium engine.

I use Gimp for a free picture/photo editor

7zip or WinZip generally come in useful at some point (I prefer 7zip)

I usually prefer Acrobat Reader vs browser plug-ins for reading PDFs but not worth it for just the occasional PDF

I've not actually tried Office 365, I have a Visual Studio dev subscription through work so just install the full blown Office locally (not strictly T&C compliant...), not sure it's worth paying for a copy vs an O365 sub though.

Other stuff depends a lot on what you're going to be using it for

– I’m just downloading Chrome now

I wouldn't bother, Edge is now basically Chrome

– Any recommendations for a good anti virus setup?

It's already all built in.

All of what FuzzyWuzzy sez plus Office365 is useful for having things saved to the cloud all the time in case things go to pieces.  It's a bargain imho compared to the pain when your machine dies and you've lost all of the stuff that wasn't important enough to save elsewhere but actually is important

and LastPass.  I use the paid version so our family have all got it plus I can share some of the shared logins with my wife.  Free version is ok but a bit more limited as you can't have it both on your phone and computer

Picasa
Firefox
Notepad++
Gimp

It's a Dell machine. Thanks, all the info above is handy

That Groupon offer for Office is really good. I might be able to get away with Google programs in the short term, but having word is helpful and it's only £18

I've got used to Chrome. I use it at work and I have a gmail account so all my stuff links across pretty well

and LastPass.

Not since they were sold to Logmein and started limiting what the free account can do.

Dumped LastPass and moved to Bitwarden

How to export all your LastPass passwords and pick an alternative | WIRED UK

Will look at Gimp, might avoid looking at that on my work laptop... 🙂

Is the Chrome password tool easily hackable? I tend to use my apple products for managing passwords but was too tight to buy a macbook

Paint.Net is easier to use than Gimp, albeit not as powerful.

If you're doing any kind of programming (I'm guessing not but just in case) Visual Studio Code is great.

And there's a reason everyone uses Office: it's light years ahead of the competition.

Literally just had a new laptop arrive. It’s running Windows 10. Trying to work out what software I’ll need to get up and running? Any recommendations?

Switch it on. Congratulations, you're up and running. If you don't know what software you need, you don't need it.

– The intro offered Office 365 for £80 year after the 1 month free period but it looks cheaper on Amazon at £55. Any better solutions than that?

MS Office is free online.

– Any recommendations for a good anti virus setup?

Uninstall whatever shit it came bundled with as a 'trial'. Windows Defender will kick in. That's perfectly adequate unless you're into your porn or unable to not click on phishing emails.

– And good but not too advanced photo processing. Does the inbuilt one do enough?

Define "photo processing".

I'm a lazy bastard and don't really understand computers so I go to Ninite, pick a few favourites and let it run. After that, you need to know what you want

IM(ignorant)O

After years of using 10 year old versions of Office I recently went with 365. It's not a lot different, a bit slower but the cloud storage is what makes it great.
At first I got annoyed that if I wanted to use an existing doc, modify it and then "save as" I couldn't. But when that made me find that all previous versions of the doc were still retrievable, i thought that was priceless. It also promoted me to tidy up my directories too.

About to get a new work laptop here. It's coming with 365 for the cost saving and cloud storage advantages but I've never used it before.

At first I got annoyed that if I wanted to use an existing doc, modify it and then “save as” I couldn’t.

So what's this all about? Sounds seriously limiting.

(sorry if it's a numpty question)

Ignore that comment, you can "save as" just as easy online as you could offline.

You can save a copy, at least you can on mine

I use 365 at work. Works really well and lets me flick between laptop, ipad and iphone easily. But work kit is all locked down so can't use work software easily without emailing docs back and forth

@cougar - thanks. Didn't know about MS office online, it'll be used with wifi generally so might try that and see. Although £20 on a hard copy of office 2019 isn't much considering how much the laptop was. Sounds like Windows Defender will suffice for me

Good Q re picture processing, very basic stuff really. Tweaking levels, iphone style pic processing. Could probably do that with a windows bit of software. I had vague dreams of taking nice pics and playing with them but reality might hit and I'll stick with iphone snaps!

The "Save As" issue:
If I want to - for example - produce an invoice based on a previous quote, the way I used to do it was to call up the quote, change the title and date then save it as the new invoice.
But if I do that now, what happens is any changes get auto-saved as the original - so you think you've just lost the original document.
What I (try to remember to) do now is call up the quote, Save A Copy, then work on the new copy, leaving the original intact. Easy as you like.
Until I found I could go into the Info section and see the version history and restore the version I wanted, I thought I'd lost the original. But the Version History Restore is brilliant. More than once I've done a lot of work then, instead of pressing shift and a to write April I've pressed ctrl and a, so all that's left of my 100 page masterpiece is "pril".
No such worry now.

If I want to – for example – produce an invoice based on a previous quote, the way I used to do it was to call up the quote, change the title and date then save it as the new invoice.

This is what templates are for. Change the document type when you first save it and this problem will go away.

instead of pressing shift and a to write April I’ve pressed ctrl and a, so all that’s left of my 100 page masterpiece is “pril”.

This is what Undo is for. Ctrl-Z (and Ctrl-Y is Redo, if you Undo too far).

Also:

I'm not saying this to be an arse but trying to be helpful,

Get some training, there's tons of free courses online (I think MS do them themselves even). Office is a beast of a suite of applications and most people who use it a) probably don't really need something so heavyweight and b) don't have a clue what the hell they're doing. I've used it for 25 years and I barely have a clue what I'm doing, even.

I've worked in support and in the vast majority of cases where people are going "bloody Office, it's a piece of crap, it's done [thing] again!" it's user error. These things arguably should be intuitive but often aren't, you wouldn't get behind a wheel without taking driving lessons.

Open existing document, save as, edit document... It's exactly the same process on or off line.

... or use it as intended rather than coming up with unnecessary workarounds. This functionality is baked into Word and has been for decades.

Came here to say a load of stuff and Cougar has said it all already 🙂

Bitwarden is great because once you get it installed as a browser extension and as a phone app it all syncs rather than relying on the browser remembering stuff on devices; password managers are great.