On Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 7:38:53 AM UTC-4, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"John Doe" wrote in message ...

"Jim Wilkins" wrote:

This is a test to confirm that I can finally retire my XP laptop
and post from this Win7 one.

I don't see the problem with Windows 10. I get the impression it is
easier to do a fresh install. As a PC guru, I do not see anything at all
wrong with the thing, overall. If you are concerned about invasion of
privacy, there are plenty of guides online for disabling that stuff.

Good luck.
------------------------

My security protocol includes treating the Internet laptop as a 'sandbox'
that can be restored from an Acronis backup of the boot drive and normal
copies of the others. The minimal way to do this is by saving Seagate Disk
Wizard backups on a USB drive, but it's better to have a second similar
laptop that can wipe and restore the bare drive from the Internet one, or
substitute for it to at least basic browsing like weather and email. This
spare also protects from dropping the laptop and lightning strikes.

Yesterday I had a scare when my antivirus froze during a scan, while I was
cleaning up before saving a backup. A few hours later they released revised
versions of the app and database.

The laptops I've chosen are new enough to run Win 7, old enough to be really
cheap. My Internet laptop cost me $15, the backup machine was "$1 bad"
though I found no problem with it. Maybe when Win 10 capable machines become
cheap I'll buy a second and risk the slower one on the Net.


--
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG.
https://www.avg.com

Beware of Acronis. More than once they've done "upgrades" which left old image files unusable (ask me how I know). With drives being as cheap as they are, the free version of Macrium Reflect can copy a drive pretty quickly, and then it's just bootable.